/  Ssay 


/-nv 


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FORTY  YEARS  OF   IT 


BY  RALPH  HENRY   BARBOUR. 

Benton's  Venture. 

Around  the  End. 

The  Junior  Trophy. 

Change  Signals ! 

For  Yardley. 

Finkler's  Field. 

Winning  His  "Y." 

The  New  Boy  at  Hilltop. 

Double  Play. 

Forward  Pass ! 

The  Spirit  of  the  School. 

Four  in  Camp. 

Four  Afoot. 

Four  Afloat. 

The  Arrival  of  Jimpson. 

Behind  the  Line. 

Captain  of  the  Crew. 

For  the  Honor  of  the   School. 

The  Half -Back. 

On  Your  Mark. 

Weatherby '»  Inning. 

D.   APPLETON   &   COMPANY.    NEW   YORK. 

71 


FORTY 
YEARS  OF  IT 


BY 

BRAND  WHITLOCK 


NEW  YORK  AND  LONDON 

D.  APPLETON  AND  COMPANY 

MCMXIV 


Copyright,  1914,  bt 
D.  APPLETON  AND  COMPANY 

Copyright,  1913,  by  The  Phhaips  Publishing  Compamy 


Printed  in  the  United  States  of  America 


TO  THE  MEMORY  OF 
MY  FATHER 

ELIAS  D.  WHITLOCK 

WHO   DIED    DECEMBER   23,    1913 

A  MINISTER  OF  THE  SANCTUARY,  AND 
OF  THE  TRUE  TABERNACLE,  WHICH 
THE   LORD  PITCHED,  AND  NOT  MAN 


INTRODUCTION 

The  history  of  democracy's  progress  in  a  mid- 
Western  city — so,  to  introduce  this  book  in  specific 
terms,  one  perhaps  inevitably  must  call  it.  Yet  in 
using  the  word  democracy,  one  must  plead  for  a  dis- 
tinction, or,  better,  a  reversion,  indicated  by  the 
curious  anchylosis  that,  at  a  certain  point  in  their 
maturity,  usually  sets  in  upon  words  newly  put  in 
use  to  express  some  august  and  large  spiritual  real- 
ity. We  all  know  how  this  materializing  tendency, 
if  one  may  call  it  that,  has  affected  our  notion  and 
our  use  of  the  commonest  religious  terms  like  faith, 
grace,  salvation,  for  instance.  Their  connotation, 
originally  fluid,  spiritual  and  subjective,  has  become 
concrete,  limited,  partial,  ignoble.  So,  too,  in  our 
common  speech,  even  above  the  catchpenny  vocabu- 
lary of  the  demagogue  or  politician,  the  word  de- 
mocracy has  taken  on  the  limited,  partial  and  ig- 
noble connotation  of  more  or  less  incidental  and 
provisional  forms  of  democracy's  practical  outcome ; 
or  even  of  by-products  not  directly  traceable  to 
the  action  of  democracy  itself.  How  often,  for  ex- 
ample, do  we  see  direct  primaries,  the  single  tax, 
the  initiative  and  referendum  posed  in  a  kind  of 

vii 


INTRODUCTION 

sacramental  relation  to  "fundamental  democracy"; 
or  the  "essential  movement  of  democracy"  meas- 
ured, say,  by  the  increased  returns  on  the  Socialist 
ticket  at  some  local  election ! 

The  permanent  value  of  this  book  is  that  it  pro- 
ceeds out  of  a  truly  adequate  and  philosophical  con- 
ception of  democracy.  That  the  collective  human 
spirit  should  know  itself,  Karafxadeiv  rqv  <f>vaiv  leal  ravrq 
hrtaOai,  that  the  state,  the  communal  unit,  should  be, 
in  Mr.  Arnold's  phrase,  "the  expression  of  our  best 
self,  which  is  not  manifold  and  vulgar  and  unstable 
and  contentious  and  ever  varying,  but  one  and  noble 
and  secure  and  peaceful  and  the  same  for  all  man- 
kind"; here  we  have  in  outline  the  operation  of 
democracy.  One  could  not  give  this  volume  higher 
praise  than  to  say,  as  in  justice  one  must  say,  that 
it  clearly  discerns  and  abundantly  conveys  the 
spirit  which  works  in  human  nature  toward  this  end. 

How  important  it  is  to  maintain  this  fluid,  philo- 
sophical and  spiritual  view  of  democracy  may  be 
seen  when  we  look  about  us  and  consider  the  plight 
of  those — especially  the  many  now  concerned  in 
politics,  whether  professionally  or  as  eager  ama- 
teurs— who  for  lack  of  it  confuse  various  aspects  of 
the  political  problem  of  liberty  with  the  social  prob- 
lem of  equality.  With  political  liberty  or  with  self- 
expression  of  the  individual  in  politics,  democracy 

viii 


INTRODUCTION 

has,  and  ever  has  had,  very  little  to  do.  It  is  our 
turbid  thought  about  democracy  that  prevents  our 
seeing  this.  The  aristopratic  and  truculent  barons 
did  more  for  the  political  freedom  of  Englishmen 
than  was  ever  done  by  democracy;  a  selfish  and 
sensual  king  did  more  to  gain  the  individual  Eng- 
lishman his  freedom  of  self-expression  in  politics. 
In  our  own  country  it  is  matter  of  open  and  notori- 
ous fact  that  a  political  party  whose  every  senti- 
ment and  tendency  is  aristocratic  has  been  the  one 
to  bring  about  the  largest  measures  of  political  en- 
franchisement. Now,  surely,  one  may  heartily  wel- 
come every  enlargement  of  political  liberty,  but  if 
one  attributes  them  to  a  parentage  which  is  not 
theirs,  if  one  relates  them  under  democracy,  the 
penalty  which  nature  inexorably  imposes  upon  error 
is  sure  to  follow.  If,  therefore,  in  the  following 
pages  the  author  seems  occasionally  lukewarm 
toward  certain  enfranchising  measures,  I  do  not 
understand  that  he  disparages  them,  but  only  that 
he  sees — as  their  advocates,  firmly  set  in  the  con- 
fusion we  speak  of,  cannot  see — that  their  connec- 
tion with  democracy  is  extremely  indistinct  and  re- 
mote. Equality — a  social  problem,  not  to  be 
worked  out  by  the  mechanics  of  politics,  but  appeal- 
ing wholly  to  the  best  self,  the  best  reason  and 
spirit   of   man, — this   is   democracy's    concern,   de- 

ix 


INTRODUCTION 

mocracy's  chief  interest.  It  is  to  our  author's 
praise,  again,  that  he  sees  this  clearly  and  expresses 
it  convincingly. 

By  far  the  most  admirable  and  impressive  picture 
in  this  book  appears  to  me  to  be  that  which  the 
author  has  all  unconsciously  drawn  of  himself.  It 
reveals  once  more  that  tragedy — the  most  profound, 
most  common  and  most  neglected  of  all  the  multi- 
tude of  useless  tragedies  that  our  weak  and  waste- 
ful civilization  by  sheer  indifference  permits — the 
tragedy  of  a  richly  gifted  nature  denied  the  oppor- 
tunity of  congenial  self-expression.  What  by  com- 
parison is  the  tragedy  of  starvation,  since  so  very 
many  willingly  starve,  if  haply  they  may  find  this 
opportunity?  The  author  is  an  artist,  a  born  art- 
ist. His  natural  place  is  in  a  world  unknown  and 
undreamed  of  by  us  children  of  an  age  commissioned 
to  carry  out  the  great  idea  of  industrial  and  politi- 
cal development.  He  belongs  by  birthright  in  the 
eternal  realm  of  divine  impossibilities,  of  sublime 
and  delightful  inconsistencies.  Greatly  might  he 
have  fulfilled  his  destiny  in  music,  in  poetry,  in  paint- 
ing had  he  been  born  at  one  of  those  periods  when 
spiritual  activity  was  all  but  universal,  when  spirit- 
ual ideas  were  popular  and  dominant,  volitantes  per 
ora  virum,  part  of  the  very  air  one  breathed — in 
the  Greece  of  Pericles,  the  England  of  Elizabeth,  or 

x 


INTRODUCTION 

on  the  Tuscan  hills  at  the  time  of  the  Florentine 
Renaissance!  But  this  was  not  to  be.  An  admirer, 
jealous  of  every  possible  qualification,  reminds  me 
that  I  should  call  him  at  least  a  philosophical  artist ; 
yes,  but  not  by  nature  even  that.  The  toga  did  not 
drop  upon  him  readymade  from  a  celestial  loom.  It 
was  woven  and  fitted  laboriously  by  his  own  hands. 
He  sought  philosophical  consistency  and  found  it 
and  established  himself  in  it;  but  only  as  part  of 
the  difficult  general  discipline  of  an  alien  life. 

What  an  iron  discipline,  and  how  thoroughly  alien 
a  life,  stands  revealed  to  the  eye  of  poetic  insight 
and  the  spirit  of  sympathetic  delicacy,  on  every 
page  of  these  memoirs.  For  the  over-refined  (as  we 
say),  the  oversensitive  soul  of  a  born  artist — think 
of  the  experience,  think  of  the  achievement!  The 
very  opposite  of  all  that  makes  a  politician,  apprais- 
ing politics  always  at  their  precise  value,  yet  pa- 
tiently spending  all  the  formative  years  of  his  life 
in  the  debilitating  air  of  politics  for  the  sake  of  what 
he  might  indirectly  accomplish.  Not  an  executive, 
yet  incessantly  occupied  with  tedious  details  of  ad- 
ministrative work,  for  the  satisfaction  of  knowing 
them  well  done.  Not  a  philosopher,  yet  laboriously 
making  himself  what  Glanvil  quaintly  calls  "one  of 
those  larger  souls  who  have  traveled  the  divers  cli- 
mates of  opinion"  until  he  acquired  a  social  philos- 

xi 


INTRODUCTION 

ophy  that  should  meet  his  own  exacting  demands. 

Is  it  too  much,  then,  that  I  invite  the  reader's 
forbearance  with  these  paragraphs  to  show  why  our 
author  should  himself  take  rank  and  estimation  with 
the  great  men  whom  he  reverently  pictures?  He 
tells  the  story  of  Altgeld  and  of  Johnson,  energetic 
champions  of  the  newer  political  freedom.  He  tells 
the  story  of  Jones,  the  incomparable  true  democrat, 
one  of  the  children  of  light  and  sons  of  the  Resurrec- 
tion, such  as  appear  but  once  in  an  era.  And  in 
the  telling  of  these  men  and  of  himself  as  the  alien 
and,  in  his  own  view,  largely  accidental  continuator 
of  their  work,  it  seems  to  me  that  he  indicates  the 
process  by  which  he  too  has  worked  out  his  own 
position  among  them  as  "one  of  those  consoling 
and  hope-inspiring  marks  which  stand  forever  to 
remind  our  weak  and  easily  discouraged  race  how 
high  human  goodness  and  perseverance  have  once 
been  carried  and  may  be  carried  again." 

Albert  Jay  Nock. 

The  American  Magazine, 
New  York. 


FORTY  YEARS  OF  IT 


FORTY  YEARS  OF  IT 


One  hot  afternoon  in  the  summer  of  my  tenth 
year,  my  grandfather,  having  finished  the  nap  he  was 
accustomed  to  take  after  the  heavy  dinner  which,  in 
those  days,  was  served  at  noon  in  his  house,  told  me 
that  I  might  go  up-town  with  him.  This  was  not 
only  a  relief,  but  a  prospect  of  adventure.  It  was 
a  relief  to  have  him  finish  his  nap,  because  while  he 
was  taking  his  nap,  my  grandmother  drew  down 
at  all  the  windows  the  heavy  green  shades,  which, 
brought  home  by  the  family  after  a  residence  in  Nu- 
remberg, were  decorated  at  the  bottom  with  a  frieze 
depicting  scenes  along  the  Rhine,  and  a  heavy  and 
somnolent  silence  was  imposed  on  all  the  house. 
When  my  grandfather  took  his  nap,  life  seemed  to 
pause,  all  activities  were  held  in  suspense. 

And  the.  prospect  was  as  a  pleasant  adventure, 
because  whenever  my  grandfather  let  me  go  up 
town  with  him  he  always  made  me  a  present,  which 
was  sure  to  be  more  valuable,  more  expensive,  than 
those  little  gifts  at  home,  bestowed  as  rewards  of 
various  merits  and  sacrifices  related  to  that  insti- 
tution of  the  afternoon  nap,  and  forthcoming  if  he 
got  through  the  nap  satisfactorily,  that  is,  without 

1 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

being  awakened.  They  consisted  of  mere  money,  the 
little  five  or  ten  cent  notes  of  green  scrip;  "shin- 
plasters"  they  were  called,  I  believe,  in  those  days. 

When  my  grandfather  had  rearranged  his  toilet, 
combing  his  thick  white  hair  and  then  immediately 
running  his  fingers  through  it  to  rumple  it  up  and 
give  him  a  savage  aspect,  we  set  forth. 

He  wore  broad  polished  shoes,  low,  and  fastened 
with  buckles,  and  against  the  black  of  his  attire 
his  stiffly  starched,  immaculate  white  waistcoat  was 
conspicuous.  Only  a  few  of  its  lower  buttons  of 
pearl  were  fastened;  above  that  it  was  open,  and 
from  one  of  the  buttonholes,  the  second  from  the 
top,  his  long  gold  watch-chain  hung  from  its  large 
gold  hook.  The  black  cravat  was  not  hidden  by 
his  white  beard,  which  he  did  not  wear  as  long  as 
many  Ohio  gentlemen  of  that  day,  and  he  was 
crowned  by  a  large  Panama  hat,  yellowed  by  years 
of  summer  service,  and  bisected  by  a  ridge  that  be- 
gan at  the  middle  of  the  broad  brim  directly  in  front, 
ran  back,  climbed  and  surmounted  the  large  high 
crown,  and  then,  descending,  ended  its  impressive 
career  at  the  middle  of  the  broad  brim  behind. 

I  was  walking  on  his  left  hand,  near  the  fence, 
but  as  we  entered  the  shade  of  the  elms  and  shrub- 
bery of  the  Swedenborgian  churchyard,  I  went 
around  to  his  other  side,  because  a  ghost  dwelt  in 
the  Swedenborgian  churchyard.  My  cousin  had 
pointed  it  out  to  me,  and  once  I  had  seen  it  dis- 
tinctly. 

The  precaution  was  unnecessary,  for  I  had  long 
known  my  grandfather  for  a  brave  man.     He  had 

2 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

been  a  soldier,  and  many  persons  in  Urbana  still  sa- 
luted him  as  major,  though  at  that  time  he  was 
mayor;  going  up  town,  in  fact,  meant  to  go  to  the 
town  hall  before  going  anywhere  else.  In  the  shade 
he  removed  his  hat,  and  taking  out  a  large  silk 
handkerchief,  passed  it  several  times  over  his  red, 
perspiring  face. 

It  was,  as  I  have  said,  a  hot  afternoon,  even  for 
an  August  afternoon  in  Ohio,  and  it  was  the  hot- 
test hour  of  the  afternoon.  Main  Street,  when  we 
turned  into  it  presently,  was  deserted,  and  wore  an 
unreal  appearance,  like  the  street  of  the  dead 
town  that  was  painted  on  the  scene  at  the  "opera- 
house."  Far  to  the  south  it  stretched  its  intermina- 
ble length  in  white  dust,  until  its  trees  came  to- 
gether in  that  mysterious  distance  where  the  fair- 
grounds were,  and  to  the  north  its  vista  was  closed 
by  the  bronze  figure  of  the  cavalryman  standing 
on  his  pedestal  in  the  Square,  his  head  bowed  in  sad 
meditation,  one  gaunfleted  hand  resting  on  his  hip, 
the  other  on  his  saber-hilt.  Out  over  the  thick  dust 
of  the  street  the  heat  quivered  and  vibrated,  and 
if  you  squinted  in  the  sun  at  the  cavalryman,  he 
seemed  to  move,  to  tremble,  in  the  shimmer  of  that 
choking  atmosphere. 

The  town  hall  stood  in  Market  Square;  for,  in 
addition  to  the  Square,  where  the  bronze  cavalry- 
man stood  on  his  pedestal,  there  was  Market  Square, 
the  day  of  civic  centers  not  having  dawned  on  Ur- 
bana in  that  time,  nor,  doubtless,  in  this. 

Market  Square  was  not  a  square,  however,  but 
a  parallelogram,   and  on  one  side   of  it,   fronting 

8 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

Main  Street,  was  the  town  hall,  a  low  building  of 
brick,  representing  in  itself  an  amazing  unity  of 
municipal  functions — the  germ  of  the  group  plan, 
no  doubt,  and,  after  all,  in  its  little  way,  a  civic 
center  indeed.  For  there,  in  an  auditorium,  plays 
were  staged  before  a  populace  innocent  of  the  fact 
that  it  had  a  municipal  theater,  and  in  another  room 
the  city  council  sat,  with  representatives  from 
Lighttown,  and  Gooseville,  and  Guinea,  and  the 
other  faubourgs  of  our  little  municipality.  Under 
that  long  low  roof,  too,  were  the  "calaboose"  and 
the  headquarters  of  the  fire  department.  Back  of 
these  the  structure  sloped  away  into  a  market-house 
of  some  sort,  with  a  public  scales,  and  broad,  low, 
overhanging  eaves,  in  the  shade  of  which  firemen, 
and  the  city  marshal,  and  other  officials,  in  the  dim 
retrospect,  seem  to  have  devoted  their  leisure  to  the 
game  of  checkers. 

On  the  opposite  side  of  Market  Square  there  was 
a  line  of  brick  buildings,  painted  once,  perhaps,  and 
now  of  a  faint  pink  or  cerise  which  certain  of  the 
higher  and  more  artistic  grades  of  calcimining  as- 
sume, and  there  seems  to  have  been  a  series,  almost 
interminable,  of  small  saloons — declining  and  fading 
away  somewhere  to  the  east,  in  the  dark  purlieus  of 
Guinea. 

Here,  along  this  line  of  saloons,  if  it  was  a  line 
of  saloons,  or,  if  it  was  not,  along  the  side  of  the 
principal  saloon  which  in  those  wet  days  commanded 
that  corner,  there  were  always  several  carts,  driven 
by  Irishmen  from  Lighttown,  smoking  short  clay 
pipes,  and  two-wheeled  drays  driven  by  negroes  from 

4 


FORTY   YEARS    OF   IT 

Guinea  or  Gooseville.  These  negro  drivers  were 
burly  men  with  shining  black  skins  and  gleaming 
eyes  and  teeth,  whose  merry  laughter  was  almost  be- 
lied by  the  ferocious,  brutal  whips  they  carried — 
whips  precisely  like  that  Simon  Legree  had  wielded 
in  the  play  in  the  theater  just  across  the  Square, 
now,  by  a  stroke  of  poetic  justice,  in  the  hands  of 
Uncle  Tom  himself.  But  on  this  day  the  firemen 
were  not  to  be  seen  under  the  eaves  of  the  market- 
house;  their  checker-boards  were  quite  abandoned. 
The  mules  between  the  shafts  of  these  two-wheeled 
drays  hung  their  heads  and  their  long  ears  drooped 
under  the  heat,  and  their  black  masters  were  curled 
up  on  the  sidewalk  against  the  wall  of  the  saloon, 
asleep.  The  Irishmen  were  nowhere  to  be  seen,  and 
Market  Square  was  empty,  deserted,  and  sprawled 
there  reflecting  the  light  in  a  blinding  way,  while 
from  the  yellow,  dusty  level  of  its  cobbled  surface 
rose,  wave  on  wave,  palpably,  that  trembling,  shim- 
mering, vibrating  heat.  And  yet,  there  was  one 
waking,  living  thing  in  sight.  There,  out  in  the  mid- 
dle of  the  Square  he  stood,  a  dusty,  drab  figure,  with 
an  old  felt  hat  on  a  head  that  must  have  ached  and 
throbbed  in  that  implacable  heat,  with  a  mass  of 
rags  upon  him,  his  frayed  trousers  gathered  at  his 
ankles  and  bound  about  by  irons,  and  a  ball  and 
chain  to  bind  him  to  that  spot.  He  had  a  broom  in 
his  hands,  and  was  aimlessly  making  a  little  smudge 
of  dust,  doing  his  part  in  the  observance  of  an  old, 
cruel,  and  hideous  superstition. 

I  knew,  of  course,  that  he  was  a  prisoner.  Usually 
there  were  three  or  four,  sometimes  half  a  dozen, 

5 


FORTY   YEARS    OF   IT 

such  as  he.  They  were  the  chain-gang,  and  they 
were  Bad — made  so  by  Rum.  I  knew  that  they 
were  brought  out  of  the  calaboose,  that  damp,  dark 
place  under  the  roof  of  the  market-house,  somewhere 
between  the  office  of  the  mayor  and  the  headquarters 
of  the  fire  department;  and  glimpses  were  to  be 
caught  now  and  then  of  their  faces  pressed  against 
those  bars. 

When,  under  the  shade  of  the  broad  eaves,  we 
were  about  to  enter  the  mayor's  office,  my  grand- 
father motioned  to  the  prisoner  out  there  in  the 
center  of  the  Square,  who  with  a  new  alacrity 
dropped  his  broom,  picked  up  his  ball,  and  lugging 
it  in  his  arms,  came  up  close  to  us,  so  very  close 
that  I  could  see  the  sweat  that  drenched  his  fore- 
head, stood  in  great  beads  on  his  upper  lip,  matted 
the  hair  on  his  forearms,  stained  with  dark  splashes 
his  old  shirt,  and  glistened  on  his  throat  and  breast, 
burned  red  by  the  sun.  He  dropped  his  ball, 
took  off  that  rag  of  a  hat,  raised  eyelids  that 
were  powdered  with  dust,  and  looked  at  my  grand- 
father. 

"How  many  days  did  I  give  you?"  my  grand- 
father asked  him. 

"Fifteen,  your  honor,"  he  said. 

"How  long  have  you  been  in?" 

"Three  days,  your  honor." 

"Are  you  the  only  one  in  there?" 

"Yes,  your  honor." 

My  grandfather  paused  and  looked  at  him. 

"Pretty  hot  out  there,  isn't  it?"  asked  my  grand- 
father. 

6 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

The  prisoner  smiled,  a  smile  exactly  like  that 
anyone  would  have  for  such  a  question,  but  the 
smile  flickered  from  his  face,  as  he  said: 

"Yes,  your  honor." 

My  grandfather  looked  out  over  the  Square  and 
up  and  down.  There  was  no  one  anywhere  to  be 
seen. 

"Well,  come  on  into  the  office." 

The  prisoner  picked  up  his  ball,  and  followed  my 
grandfather  into  the  mayor's  office.  My  grandfather 
went  to  a  desk,  drew  out  a  drawer,  fumbled  in  it, 
found  a  key,  and  with  this  he  stooped  and  unlocked 
the  irons  on  the  prisoner's  ankles.  But  he  did  not 
remove  the  irons — he  seated  himself  in  the  large 
chair,  and  leaned  comfortably  against  its  squeaking 
cane  back. 

"Now,"  my  grandfather  said,  "you  go  out  there 
in  the  Square — be  careful  not  to  knock  the  leg  irons 
off  as  you  go, — and  you  sweep  around  for  a  little 
while,  and  when  the  coast  is  clear  you  kick  them 
off  and  light  out." 

The  creature  in  the  drab  rags  looked  at  my 
grandfather  a  moment,  opened  his  lips,  closed  them, 
swallowed,  and  then.  .  . 

"You'd  better  hurry,"  said  my  grandfather,  "I 
don't  know  what  minute  the  marshal " 

The  prisoner  gathered  up  his  ball,  hugged  it  care- 
fully, almost  tenderly,  in  his  arms,  and,  with  infinite 
delicacy  as  to  the  irons  on  his  feet,  he  shuffled  care- 
fully, yet  somehow  swiftly  out.  I  saw  him  an  in- 
stant in  the  brilliant  glittering  sunlight  framed  by 
the  door;  he  looked  back,  and  then  he  disappeared, 

7 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

leaving  only  the  blank  surface  of  the  cobblestones 
with  the  heat  trembling  over  them. 

My  grandfather  put  on  his  glasses,  turned  to  his 
desk,  and  took  up  some  papers  there.  And  I  waited, 
in  the  still,  hot  room.  The  minutes  were  ticked 
off  by  the  clock.  I  wondered  at  each  loud  tick  if 
it  was  the  minute  in  which  it  would  be  proper  for 
the  prisoner  to  kick  off  those  irons  from  his  ankles 
and  start  to  run.  And  then,  after  a  few  minutes, 
a  man  appeared  in  the  doorway,  and  said  breath- 
lessly : 

"Joe,  he  has  escaped!" 

It  was  Uncle  John,  a  brother  of  my  grandfather, 
one  of  the  Brands  of  Kentucky,  then  on  a  visit — 
one  of  those  long  visits  by  which  he  and  my  grand- 
father sought  to  make  up  the  large  arrears  of  the 
differences,  the  divisions,  and  the  separations  of  the 
great  war.  He  was  nearly  of  my  grandfather's 
age,  and  like  him  a  large  man,  with  a  white  though 
longer  beard.  At  his  entrance  my  grandfather  did 
not  turn,  nor  speak,  and  Uncle  John  Brand  cried 
again : 

"Joe,  he's  gone,  I  tell  you;  he's  getting 
away !" 

My  grandfather  looked  up  then  from  his  papers 
and  said: 

"John,  you'd  better  come  in  out  of  that  heat  and 
sit  down.      You're  excited." 

"But  he's  getting  away,  I  tell  you!  Don't  you 
understand  ?" 

"Who  is  getting  away?" 

"Why,  that  prisoner." 
8 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

"What  prisoner?" 

"The  prisoner  out  there  in  the  Square.  He  has 
escaped !     He's  gone !" 

"But  how  do  you  know?" 

"I  just  saw  him  running  down  Main  Street  like 
a  streak  of  lightning." 

My  grandfather  took  out  his  silk  handkerchief, 
passed  it  over  his  brow,  and  said: 

"To  think  of  anyone  running  on  a  day  like  this !" 

And  Uncle  John  Brand  stood  there  and  gazed  at 
his  brother  with  an  expression  of  despair. 

"Can't  you  understand,"  he  said,  speaking  in 
an  intense  tone,  as  if  somehow  to  impress  my  grand- 
father with  the  importance  of  this  event  in  society, 
"can't  you  understand  that  the  prisoner  out  there 
in  the  Square  has  broken  away,  has  escaped,  and  at 
this  minute  is  running  down  Main  Street,  and  that 
he's  getting  farther  and  farther  away  with  each 
moment  that  you  sit  there?" 

I  had  a  vivid  picture  of  the  man  running  with  long 
strides,  in  the  soft  dust  of  Main  Street;  he  must 
even  then,  I  fancied,  be  far  down  the  street ;  he 
must  indeed  be  down  by  Bailey's,  and  perhaps 
Bailey's  dog  was  rushing  out  at  him,  barking.  And 
I  hoped  he  would  run  faster,  and  faster,  and  get 
away,  though  I  felt  it  was  wrong  to  hope  this. 
Uncle  John  Brand  seemed  to  be  right;  though  I 
did  not  like  him  as  I  liked  my  grandfather. 

"But  how  could  he  get  away?"  my  grandfather 
was  asking.     "He  was  in  irons." 

"He  got  the  irons  off  somehow,"  Uncle  John 
Brand  said,  exasperated;  "I  don't  know  how.     He 

9 


FORTY   YEARS    OF   IT 

(didn't  stop  to  explain!"  He  found  a  relief  in  this 
fine  sarcasm,  and  then  said: 

"Aren't  you  going  to  do  anything?" 

"Well,"  said  my  grandfather,  with  an  irresolu- 
tion quite  uncommon  in  him,  "I  suppose  I  really 
ought  to  do  something.  But  I  don't  know  just  what 
to  do."  He  sat  up,  and  looked  about  all  over  the 
room.     "You  don't  see  the  marshal,  do  you?" 

Uncle  John  Brand  was  looking  at  him  now  in 
idisgust. 

"Just  look  outside  there,  will  you,  John,"  my 
grandfather  went  on,  "and  see  if  you  can  find  him? 
If  you  do,  send  him  in,  and  I'll  speak  to  him  and 
have  him  go  after  the  prisoner." 

Uncle  John  Brand  of  Kentucky  stood  a  moment 
in  the  doorway,  finding  no  words  with  which  to  ex- 
press himself,  and  then  went  out.  And  when  he 
had  gone  my  grandfather  leaned  back  in  his  chair 
and  laughed  and  laughed;  laughed  until  his  ruddy 
face  became  much  redder  than  it  was  even  from  the 
heat  of  that  day. 

n 

Now  that  I  have  set  down,  with  such  particular- 
ity, an  incident  which  I  could  not  wholly  understand 
nor  reconcile  with  the  established  order  of  things 
until  many  years  after,  I  am  not  so  sure  after  all 
that  I  witnessed  it  in  that  Urbana  of  reality;  it 
may  have  been  in  that  Urbana  of  the  memory, 
wherein  related  scenes  and  incidents  have  coalesced 
with  the  witnessed  event,  or  in  that  Macochee  of 

10 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

certain  of  my  attempts  in  fiction,  though  I  have  al- 
ways hoped  that  the  fiction  was  the  essential  reality 
of  life,  and  have  tried  to  make  it  so. 

I  am  certain,  however,  that  the  incident  as  related 
is  entirely  authentic,  for  I  have  recently  made  in- 
quiries and  established  it  beyond  a  reasonable  doubt, 
as  the  lawyers  say,  in  all  its  details  as  here  given.  I 
say  in  all  its  details,  save  possibly  as  to  that  of  my 
own  corporeal  presence  on  the  scene,  at  the  actual 
moment  of  the  occurrence.  Only  the  other  day  I 
asked  a  favorite  aunt  of  mine,  and  she  remembered 
the  incident  perfectly,  and  many  another  similar 
to  it.  "It  was  just  like  him,"  she  added,  with  a 
dubious,  though  tolerant  fondness.  But  when,  like 
the  insistent,  questioning  child  in  one  of  Riley's 
Hoosier  poems,  I  asked  her  if  I  had  been  there,  she 
said  she  could  not  remember. 

But  whether  I  was  there  in  the  flesh  or  not,  or 
whether  the  whole  reality  of  that  scene,  so  poignant, 
and  insistent,  and  indelible,  with  its  denial  of  the 
grounds  of  authority,  its  challenge  to  the  bases  of 
society,  its  shock  to  the  orthodox  mind  (like  that 
of  John  Brand  of  Kentucky,  a  strict  construction- 
ist, who  believed  in  the  old  Constitution,  and  even 
then,  in  slavery),  remains  in  my  memory  as  the  re- 
sult of  one  of  those  tricks  of  a  mind  that  has  always 
dramatized  scenes  for  its  own  amusement,  I  was 
there  in  spirit,  and,  indeed,  at  many  another  scene 
in  the  life  of  Joseph  Carter  Brand,  whose  name  my 
mother  gave  me  as  a  good  heritage.  Whatever  the 
bald  and  banal  physical  fact  may  have  been,  I  was 
either  present  at  the  actual  or  in  imagination  at  the 

11 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

described  scene  to  such  purpose  that  from  it  I  de- 
rived an  impression  never  to  be  erased  from  my 
mind. 

It  is  not  given  to  all  of  us  to  say  with  such  par- 
ticularity and  emphasis,  just  what  we  learned  from 
each  person  who  has  touched  our  existences  and 
affected  the  trend  of  our  lives,  as  it  was  given  to 
Marcus  Aurelius, 'for  instance,  so  that  one  may  say 
that  from  Rusticus  one  received  this  impression,  or 
that  from  Apollonius  one  learned  this  and  from 
Alexander  the  Platonic  that ;  we  must  rather  ascribe 
our  little  store  of  knowledge  generally  to  the  gods. 
But  I  am  sure  that  no  one  was  ever  long  with  Jo- 
seph Carter  Brand,  or  came  to  know  him  well,  with- 
out learning  that  rarest  and  most  beautiful  of  all 
the  graces  or  of  all  the  virtues — Pity. 

He,  too,  had  tears  for  all  souls  in  trouble 
Here,  and  in  hell. 

Perhaps  it  is  not  so  much  pity  as  sympathy  that 
I  mean,  but  whether  it  was  pity  or  sympathy,  it 
was  that  divine  quality  in  man  which  enables  him 
to  imagine  the  sorrows  of  others,  to  understand 
what  they  feel,  to  suffer  with  them;  in  a  word,  the 
ability  to  put  himself  in  the  other  fellow's  place — 
the  hall-mark,  I  believe,  of  true  culture,  far  more 
than  any  degree  or  doctor's  hood  could  possibly  be. 

It  may  have  been  some  such  feeling  as  this  for 
the  negroes  that  led  him,  when  a  young  man  in  Ken- 
tucky, to  renounce  a  patrimony  of  slaves  and  come 
north.     It  was  not,  to  be  sure,  a  very  large  patri- 

12 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

mony,  for  his  father  was  a  farmer  in  a  rather  small 
way  in  Bourbon  County,  and  owned  a  few  slaves,  but 
whatever  the  motive,  he  refused  to  own  human  chat- 
tels and  left  Bourbon  County,  where  his  branch  of 
the  Brands  had  lived  since  their  emigration  from 
Virginia,  to  which  colony,  so  long  before,  their  or- 
iginal had  come  as  a  Jacobite  exile  from  Forfarshire 
in  Scotland. 

My  grandfather  came  north  into  Ohio  and  Cham- 
paign County,  and  he  had  not  been  there  very  long 
before  he  went  back  to  Virginia  and  married  Lavina 
Talbott,  and  when  they  went  to  live  on  the  farm  he 
called  "Pretty  Prairie,"  he  soon  found  himself  deep 
in  Ohio  politics,  as  it  seems  the  fate  of  most  Ohioans 
to  be,  and  continued  in  that  element  all  his  life.  He 
had  his  political  principles  from  Henry  Clay, — he 
had  been  to  Ashland  and  had  known  the  family, — 
and  he  was  elected  as  a  Whig  to  the  legislature  in 
1842  and  to  the  State  Senate  of  Ohio  in  1854.  There 
he  learned  to  know  and  to  admire  Salmon  P.  Chase, 
then  governor  of  Ohio,  and  it  was  not  long  until 
he  was  in  the  Abolitionist  movement,  and  he  got  into 
it  so  deeply  that  nothing  less  than  the  Civil  War 
could  ever  have  got  him  out,  for  he  was  in  open 
defiance,  most  of  the  time,  to  the  Fugitive  Slave 
Law. 

One  of  the  accomplishments  in  which  he  took 
pride,  perhaps  next  to  his  ability  as  a  horseman, 
was  his  skill  with  the  rifle,  acquired  in  Kentucky  at 
the  expense  of  squirrels  in  the  tops  of  tall  trees  (he 
could  snuff  a  candle  with  a  rifle),  and  this  ability 
he  placed  at  the  service  of  a  negro  named  Ad  White, 

13 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

who  had  run  away  from  his  master  in  the  South, 
and  was  hidden  in  a  corn-crib  near  Urbana  when 
overtaken  by  United  States  marshals  from  Cincin- 
nati. The  negro  was  armed,  and  was  defending 
himself,  when  my  grandfather  and  his  friend  Ichabod 
Corwin,  of  a  name  tolerably  well  known  in  Ohio  his- 
tory, went  to  his  assistance,  and  drove  the  marshals 
off  by  the  hot  fire  of  their  rifles.  The  marshals  re- 
treated, and  came  up  later  with  reinforcements, 
strong  enough  to  overpower  Judge  Corwin  and  my 
grandfather,  but  the  negro  had  escaped. 

The  scrape  was  an  expensive  one;  there  were 
proceedings  against  them  in  the  United  States 
court  in  Cincinnati,  and  they  only  got  out  of  it 
years  after  when  the  Fugitive  Slave  Law  was  rapidly 
becoming  no  law,  and  Ad  White  could  live  near  Ur- 
bana in  peace  during  a  long  life,  and  be  pointed 
out  as  an  interesting  relic  of  the  great  conflict. 

This  adventure  befell  my  grandfather  in  1858, 
when  he  had  been  a  Republican  for  two  years,  hav- 
ing been  a  delegate  to  the  first  convention  of  the 
party  in  1856,  the  one  that  met  in  Pittsburgh,  before 
the  nominating  convention  which  named  Fremont  had 
met  in  Philadelphia.  He  had  attended  that  conven- 
tion with  Cassius  M.  Clay  of  Kentucky,  and  shared 
quarters  with  him  at  the  hotel. 

In  1908,  in  the  Coliseum  at  Chicago,  when  the 
Republican  National  Convention  was  in  session, 
there  were  conducted  to  the  stage  one  morning,  and 
introduced  to  the  delegates,  two  old  gentlemen  who 
had  been  delegates  to  that  first  convention  of  the 
party,  and  after  they  had  been  presented  and  duly 

14 


FORTY   YEARS    OF   IT 

celebrated  by  the  chairman  and  cheered  by  the  dele- 
gates they  were  assiduously  given  seats  in  large 
chairs,  and  there,  throughout  the  session,  side  by 
side  they  sat,  their  hands  clasped  over  the  crooks  of 
their  heavy  canes,  their  white  old  heads  unsteady, 
peering  out  in  a  certain  purblind,  bewildered,  aged 
way  over  that  mighty  assembly  of  the  power  and  the 
wealth,  the  respectability  and  the  authority,  of  the 
nation — far  other  than  that  revolutionary  gather- 
ing they  had  attended  half  a  century  before! 

All  through  the  session,  now  and  then,  I  would 
look  at  them;  there  was  a  certain  indefinable  pathos 
in  them,  they  sat  so  still,  they  were  so  old,  there 
was  in  their  attitude  the  acquiescence  of  age — and 
I  would  recall  my  grandfather's  stories  of  the  days 
when  they  were  the  force  in  the  Republic,  and  the 
runaway  "niggers,"  and  the  rifles,  and  the  great 
blazing  up  of  liberty  in  the  land,  and  it  seemed  to  me 
that  Time,  or  what  Thomas  Hardy  calls  the  Ironic 
Spirit,  or  perhaps  it  was  only  the  politicians  who 
were  managing  the  convention,  had  played  some 
grotesque,  stupendous  joke  on  those  patriarchs.  Did 
their  old  eyes,  gazing  so  strangely  on  that  scene, 
behold  its  implications?  Did  they  descry  the  guide- 
post  that  told  them  how  far  away  they  really  were 
from  that  first  convention  and  its  ideals  ? 

But  whatever  the  reflections  of  those  two  abor- 
iginal Republicans,  or  whatever  emotions  or  specula- 
tions they  may  have  inspired  in  those  who  saw  them, 
— the  torch  of  liberty  being  ever  brandished  some- 
where in  this  world  and  tossed  from  hand  to  hand, 
* — they  had  done  their  part  in  their  day,  and  might 

15 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

presumably  be  allowed  to  look  on  at  the  antics  of 
men  wherever  they  chose,  in  peace.  They  had 
known  Lincoln,  no  inconsiderable  distinction  in 
itself! 

Out  of  that  first  convention  my  grandfather,  like 
them,  had  gone,  and  he  had  done  his  part  to  help 
elect  Lincoln  after  Lincoln  had  defeated  Chase  in 
the  Chicago  convention  of  1860,  and  had  been  nomi- 
nated for  the  presidency.  And  then,  with  his  man 
elected,  my  grandfather  had  gone  into  the  war  that 
broke  upon  the  land. 

He  went  in  with  the  66th  Ohio  Volunteer  Infan- 
try, a  regiment  which  he  was  commissioned  by  Gov- 
ernor Dennison  to  recruit  at  Urbana,  and  when  it 
was  marshaled  in  camp  near  Urbana  its  command 
was  offered  him,  an  honor  and  a  responsibility  he  de- 
clined because,  he  said,  he  knew  nothing  of  the  art 
of  war,  if  it  is  an  art,  or  of  its  science,  if  it  is  a 
science,  and  so  was  content  with  the  shoulder-straps 
of  a  captain.  One  of  his  sons,  a  lieutenant  in  the 
regular  army,  was  already  at  the  front  with  his 
regiment,  and  another  son  was  a  captain  in  the  66th, 
and  later  on,  when  my  grandfather  had  been  trans- 
ferred to  the  Department  of  Subsistence,  he  took 
his  youngest  son  with  him  in  the  capacity  of  a 
clerk,  so  that  the  men  of  his  family  were  away  to 
the  war  for  those  four  years,  and  the  women  re- 
mained behind,  making  housewives  and  scraping  lint, 
and  watching,  and  waiting,  and  praying,  and  en- 
during all  those  hardships  and  making  all  those 
sacrifices  which  are  so  lauded  by  the  poetic  and  the 
sentimental  and  yet  are  not  enough  to  entitle  them 

16 


FORTY   YEARS    OF   IT 

to  a  voice  in  that  government  in  whose  cause  they 
are  made. 

The  situation  was  made  all  the  more  poignant 
because  the  great  issue  had  separated  the  family, 
and  there  were  brothers  and  cousins  on  the  other 
side,  though  one  of  these,  in  the  person  of  Aunt  Lu- 
cretia,  chose  that  inauspicious  time  to  come  over 
from  the  other  side  all  the  way  from  Virginia,  to 
pay  a  visit,  and  celebrated  the  report  of  a  Confed- 
erate victory  by  parading  up-town  with  a  butternut 
badge  on  her  bosom.  She  sailed  several  times  about 
the  Square,  with  her  head  held  high  and  her  crin- 
olines rustling  and  standing  out,  and  her  butternut 
badge  in  evidence,  and  was  rescued  by  my  grand- 
mother, who,  hearing  of  her  temerity,  went  up- 
town in  desperation  and  in  fear  that  she  might  ar- 
rive too  late.  It  was  a  story  I  was  fond  of  hearing, 
and  as  I  pictured  the  lively  scene  I  always  had  the 
statue  of  the  cavalryman  as  a  figure  in  the  picture 
— though  of  course  the  statue  could  not  have  been 
in  existence  during  the  war,  since  it  was  erected  as 
a  memorial  to  the  66th  and  a  monument  to  its  fallen 
heroes  and  their  deeds.  The  cavalryman,  an  officer 
wearing  a  romantic  cloak  and  the  old  plumed  hat 
of  the  military  fashion  of  that  date,  and  leaning  on 
his  saber  in  a  gloomy  way,  I  always  thought  was  a 
figure  of  my  uncle,  that  Captain  Brand  who  went 
out  with  the  66th,  just  as  I  thought  for  a  long  time 
that  the  Civil  War  was  practically  fought  out  on 
the  northern  side  by  the  66th,  which  was  not  so 
strange  perhaps,  since  nearly  every  family  in  Ur- 
bana  had  been  represented  in  the  regiment,  and  they 

17 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

all  talked  of  little  else  than  the  war  for  many  years. 
They  called  the  66th  the  "Bloody  Sixty-sixth,"  a 
name  I  have  since  heard  applied  to  other  regiments, 
but  the  honorable  epithet  was  not  undeserved  by  that 
legion,  for  it  had  a  long  and  most  gallant  record, 
beginning  with  the  Army  of  the  Potomac  and  fight- 
ing in  all  that  army's  battles  until  after  Gettysburg, 
and  then  with  the  11th  and  12th  corps  it  was  trans- 
ferred, under  Hooker,  to  the  Army  of  the  Tennessee, 
at  Chattanooga,  in  time  for  Lookout  Mountain  and 
Missionary  Ridge,  after  which  it  went  with  Sherman 
to  the  sea,  and  thus  completed  the  circuit  of  the 
Confederacy. 

in 

My  grandfather,  however,  did  not  go  with  his 
regiment  to  the  West.  He  had  been  transferred  to 
the  Commissary  Department,  and  he  remained  with 
the  Army  of  the  Potomac  until  the  close  of  the  war, 
and  it  was  on  some  detail  connected  with  his  duties 
in  that  department  that,  in  1865,  he  went  into  Wash- 
ington and  had  the  interview  with  President  Lincoln 
I  so  much  liked  to  hear  him  tell  about.  It  was  not 
in  the  course  of  his  military  duty  that  he  went  to 
see  the  Commander-in-Chief;  whatever  those  duties 
were  they  were  quickly  discharged  at  the  War  De- 
partment, so  that,  in  the  hours  of  freedom  remain- 
ing to  him  before  he  went  back  to  the  front,  he  did 
what  everyone  likes  to  do  in  Washington, — he  went 
to  see  the  President.  But  he  went  in  no  military 
capacity;  he  went  rather  in  that  political  capacity 

18 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

he  so  much  preferred  to  the  military,  and  he  went  as 
to  the  chief  he  had  so  long  known  and  loved  and 
followed. 

It  would  be  his  old  friend  Chase  who  presented 
him  to  the  President,  but  their  conversation  was 
soon  interrupted  by  the  entrance  of  an  aide  who 
announced  the  arrival  in  the  White  House  grounds 
of  an  Indiana  regiment  passing  through  Washing- 
ton, which,  as  seems  to  have  been  the  case  with  most 
regiments  passing  through  the  Capital,  demanded  a 
speech  from  the  President.  And  Lincoln  complied, 
and  as  he  arose  to  go  out  he  asked  my  grandfather 
to  accompany  him,  and  they  continued  their  talk  on 
the  way.  But  when  they  stood  in  the  White  House 
portico,  and  the  regiment  beheld  the  President  and 
saluted  him  with  its  lifted  cheer,  the  aide  stepped 
to  my  grandfather's  side,  and  much  to  his  chagrin 
— for  he  had  been  held  by  the  President  while  he 
finished  a  story — told  him  that  it  would  be  neces- 
sary for  him  to  drop  a  few  paces  to  the  rear.  It 
was  a  little  contretemps  that  embarrassed  my  grand- 
father, but  Lincoln,  with  his  fine  and  delicate  per- 
ceptions, divined  the  whole  situation,  and  met  it 
with  that  kindness  which  was  so  great  a  part  of 
the  humor  and  humanness  in  him,  by  saying: 

"You  see,  Mr.  Brand,  they  might  not  know  which 
was  the  President." 

It  was  not  long  after  that  he  was  at  Appomat- 
tox and  the  first  to  issue  rations  to  the  hungry  Con- 
federates who  had  just  surrendered,  and  no  act  of 
his  life  gave  him  quite  as  much  satisfaction  as  to 
have  been  the  first  to  pour  his  whole  supply  of  hard- 

19 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

tack  into  the  blankets  of  those  whom  still  and  al- 
ways he  remembered  as  of  his  own  blood.  And  that 
done,  after  they  had  ridden  into  Richmond,  he  was 
relieved  and  was  soon  back  in  Washington  calling 
on  Chase  again.  Chase  asked  him  what  he  could 
do  for  him,  and  my  grandfather  said  there  was  but 
one  thing  in  the  world  he  wanted:  namely,  to  go 
home;  and  a  request  so  simple  was  granted  with 
that  alacrity  with  which  politicians  grant  re- 
quests that,  in  their  scope,  fall  so  short  of  what 
might  have  been  expected.  But  it  was  not  long  until 
Chase's  influence  was  requested  in  a  more  substantial 
matter,  and  in  1870  my  grandfather,  with  his  wife 
and  two  younger  daughters,  was  on  his  way  across 
the  Atlantic  to  Nuremberg,  where  President  Grant 
had  appointed  him  consul. 

It  was  not,  of  course,  until  after  his  return  from 
the  foreign  experience  that  my  conscious  acquaint- 
ance with  him  began.  But  when  they  returned  and 
opened  the  old  house,  and  filled  it  with  the  spoil  of 
their  European  travel, — some  wonderful  mahogany 
furniture  and  Dresden  china,  and  other  objects  of 
far  more  delight  to  us  children, — he  and  I  began  a 
friendship  which  lasted  until  his  death,  and  was 
marred  by  no  misunderstanding,  except,  perhaps, 
as  to  the  number  of  hours  his  saddle-horse  should 
be  ridden  on  the  gallop,  and  the  German  he  wished 
me  to  read  to  him  out  of  the  little  black-bound 
volumes  of  Schiller  and  Goethe,  which  for  years 
were  his  companions.  He  held,  no  doubt  with  some 
show  of  reason  on  his  side,  that  if  he  could  master 
the  language  after  he  was  sixty,  I  might  learn  at 

20 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

least  to  read  it  before  I  was  sixteen.  The  task  had 
its  discouragements,  not  lightened,  even  in  after 
years,  when  I  read  in  their  famous  and  delightful 
correspondence  Carlyle's  advice  to  Emerson  to  pos- 
sess himself  of  the  German  language;  it  could  be 
done,  wrote  Carlyle,  in  six  weeks !  But,  like  Emer- 
son, I  was  afflicted  with  the  postponement  and  de- 
bility of  the  blond  constitution,  and  I  observed  that, 
except  in  great  moments  of  unappreciated  sacrifice, 
my  grandfather  preferred  to  read  his  German  him- 
self rather  than  to  listen  to  my  renditions. 

I  have  spoken  of  the  house  as  the  old  house,  and  I 
do  that  as  viewing  it  from  the  point  of  disadvan- 
tage of  the  years  that  have  gone  since  it  grew  out 
of  that  haze  and  mist  and  darkness  of  early  recol- 
lections into  a  place  that  was  ablaze  with  light  at 
evening  and  full  of  the  constant  wonder  and  de- 
light of  the  company  of  a  large  family.  It  was,  in- 
deed, an  old  house  then,  with  a  high-gabled  roof  at 
one  wing,  that  made  an  attic  which  we  called,  with 
a  sense  of  its  mystery,  the  "dark  room," — a  room, 
however,  not  so  dark  that  I  could  not  see  to  read 
the  old  bound  volumes  of  a  newspaper  an  uncle  had 
once  edited; — one  could  lie  under  the  little  gable 
windows  and  pore  over  the  immense  quartos,  or  more 
than  quartos,  and  exercise  the  imagination  by  read- 
ing of  some  long  dead  event,  and,  with  a  great  ef- 
fort, project  one's  self  back  to  that  time,  and  pre- 
tend to  read  with  none  other  than  its  contemporary 
impressions. 

The  cellar  of  the  house  was  not  so  interesting, 
though  it  was  mysterious,  and  far  more  terrifying. 

21 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

There  was  a  vast  fireplace  in  the  cellar,  in  which, 
as  Jane,  the  old  colored  woman  who  was  sometimes 
a  cook  and  sometimes  a  nurse,  once  solemnly  told 
my  cousin  and  me,  the  devil  dwelt,  so  that  I  visited 
it  only  once,  and  there  so  plainly  saw  the  ugly  horns 
of  that  dark  deity  that  we  fled  upstairs  and  into 
the  sunlight  again.  It  may  have  been  that  the  crane 
and  the  andirons  of  the  old  fireplace  helped  out 
the  impression,  though  after  the  original  sugges- 
tion little  was  required  to  strengthen  it,  and  we 
never  went  down  there  again,  except  to  lure  a 
younger  cousin  as  far  as  the  door  to  shudder  in  the 
awful  pleasure  of  witnessing  her  fear. 

This  gabled  wing  had  been  the  original  house, 
and  additions  had  been  built  to  it  in  two  directions, 
with  a  wide  hall,  somewhat  after  the  southern  fashion 
in  which  so  many  houses  in  that  part  of  Ohio  were 
built  in  those  days. 

It  seems  larger  in  the  retrospect  than  it  is  in 
the  reality,  and  I  am  not  endowing  it  with  the 
spaciousness  of  a  mansion;  it  was,  in  fact,  a  modest 
dwelling  of  a  dozen  rooms,  with  an  atmosphere  that 
was  imparted  to  it  by  the  furniture  that  had  been 
brought  back  from  Europe,  and  the  personality  that 
filled  it. 

My  grandfather  conducted  his  establishment  on 
a  scale  of  prodigality  that  had  a  certain  patriarchal 
air;  he  had  a  large  family,  and  he  loved  to  have 
them  all  about  him,  and  in  the  evenings  they  gath- 
ered there  at  the  piano  they  had  bought  in  Berlin, 
and  when  the  candles  in  their  curious  brass  sconces 
had  been  lighted,  there  was   music,   for   the  whole 

22 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

family  possessed  some  of  that  talent  which,  as  Presi- 
dent Eliot  rightly  declares  in  his  lecture  on  "The 
Happy  Life,"  contributes  so  much  real  pleasure. 
My  grandfather  did  not  himself  sing;  or,  at 
least,  he  sang  rarely,  and  then  only  one  or  two 
Scotch  songs,  but  when  he  could  be  induced  to 
do  this,  the  event  took  on  the  festal  air  of  a  cele- 
bration. 

His  two  younger  daughters  had  been  educated 
in  music  in  Germany,  and  there  was  something  more 
of  music  in  the  house  than  the  mere  classic  por- 
traits of  Mozart  and  Beethoven  which  hung  on  the 
wall  near  the  painting  of  the  old  castle  at  Nurem- 
berg. They  played  duets,  and  once,  at  least,  at  a 
recital  given  in  the  town,  we  achieved  the  distinc- 
tion of  a  number  played  on  two  pianos  by  my  mother 
and  her  three  sisters. 

The  May  festivals  in  "the  City,"  as  we  called  Cin- 
cinnati in  those  days,  were  a  part  of  existence,  and 
my  first  excursion  into  the  larger  world  was  when 
my  father  took  me  to  Cincinnati  to  hear  Theodore 
Thomas's  Orchestra,  which  proved  to  be  an  excur- 
sion not  only  into  a  larger  world,  but  eventually 
into  a  larger  life,- — that  life  of  music,  that  life  of  a 
love  of  all  the  arts,  which  provides  a  consolation 
that  would  be  complete  could  I  but  express  myself 
in  any  one  of  them.  I  did,  indeed,  attempt  some 
expression  of  the  joys  of  that  experience,  for  with 
more  pretension  than  I  could  dare  to-day,  I  wrote 
a  composition,  or  paper,  on  Music  which  was  printed 
in  a  child's  publication,  and  won  for  me  a  little 
prize.     It  was  twenty-two  years  before  I  was  able 

23 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

again  to  have  any  writing  of  mine  accepted  and 
published  by  a  magazine. 


IV 


Urbana  in  those  days  was  not  without  its  at- 
mosphere of  culture,  influenced  in  a  degree  by  the 
presence  of  the  Urbana  University,  a  Swedenbor- 
gian  college  which  in  the  days  before  the  war  had 
flourished,  because  so  many  of  its  students  came 
from  the  southern  states.  It  declined  after  the 
war,  but  even  after  that  event,  the  presence  of  so 
many  persons  of  the  Swedenborgian  persuasion, 
with  their  gentle  manners  and  intellectual  appre- 
ciation, kept  the  traditions  alive,  and  the  college 
itself  continued,  though  not  so  flourishingly,  on  its 
endowed  foundation. 

One  of  the  tutors  in  it  was  a  young,  brown-haired 
man  who  several  times  a  day  passed  by  my  grand- 
father's home  on  his  way  to  and  from  his  classes, 
whom  afterwards  I  came  to  admire  for  those  writings 
to  which  was  signed  the  name  of  Hjalmar  Hjorth 
Boyesen.  He  did  not  remain  long  in  Urbana,  not 
longer  it  seems  than  he  could  help,  and  to  judge 
from  some  of  his  pictures  of  various  phases  of  its 
life,  he  did  not  like  the  town  as  well  as  the  Urbana 
folk  themselves  liked  it.  It  was  a  rather  self-suf- 
ficient town,  I  fancy,  and  it  cared  so  little  for  change 
that  it  has  scarcely  changed  at  all,  save  as  one  misses 
the  faces  and  the  forms  one  used  to  see  there  in 
other  days.     It  was  the  home  of  the  distinguished 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

family,  and  the  birthplace,  too,  of  John  Quincy 
Adams  Ward,  the  sculptor,  and  the  possession  of 
a  personality  in  itself  distinguishes  a  town. 

I  was  walking  with  my  father  across  Market 
Square  not  long  ago;  it  had  shrunk  in  size  and 
seemed  little  and  mean  and  sordid,  despite  the  new 
city  hall  that  has  replaced  the  old,  and  there  was 
no  miserable  prisoner  idly  sweeping  the  cobblestones, 
though  the  negro  drivers  with  their  bull  whips  were 
snoozing  there  as  formerly. 

"They  have  been  there  ever  since  eighteen  sixty- 
six,"  said  my  father,  who  had  gone  there  in  the 
year  he  had  mentioned  on  his  coming  out  of  col- 
lege. 

His  home  was  in  Piqua,  a  town  not  far  away, 
where  his  father  had  retired  to  rest  after  his  lifelong 
labors  on  a  farm  he  had  himself  "cleared"  in  Mont- 
gomery County  many  years  before.  This  paternal 
grandfather  was  a  large,  gaunt,  silent  man,  who 
spoke  little,  and  then  mostly  in  a  sardonic  humor, 
as  when,  during  that  awful  pioneer  work  of  felling 
a  forest  to  make  a  little  plantation,  he  said  to  his 
grown  sons  who  were  helping  to  clear  away  the  un- 
derbrush of  a  walnut  wood: 

"Boys,  what  little  you  cut,  pile  here." 

Few  other  of  his  sayings  have  been  preserved,  and 
it  may  be  that  he  has  left  behind  an  impression  that 
he  never  talked  at  all  because  he  never  talked  poli- 
tics, and  not  to  do  that  in  Ohio  dooms  one  to  a 
silence  almost  perpetual.  He  had  once  been  a  Demo- 
crat, and  had  participated  with  such  enthusiasm  in 
the  campaign  of  1856  that  he  had  kept  his  horses' 

25 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

tails  and  manes  braided  for  a  month  that  they 
might  roll  forth  in  noble  curls  when  they  were  loos- 
ened, and  the  horses  harnessed  to  a  carriage  con- 
taining four  veterans  of  the  Revolution,  who  were  to 
be  thus  splendidly  drawn  to  the  raising  of  a  tall 
hickory  pole  in  honor  of  James  Buchanan,  that  year 
a  candidate  for  president.  But  the  old  diplomatist 
made  such  a  miserable  weakling  failure  of  his 
administration  that  his  Piqua  partizan  became 
disgusted  and  renounced  forever  his  interest  in 
political  affairs,  and,  like  Henry  I.,  never  smiled 
again. 

But  my  Grandfather  Brand,  when  he  was  not 
talking  about  poetry  or  the  war,  was  talking  about 
politics ;  sometimes  world  politics,  for  he  was  inter- 
ested in  that;  sometimes  European  politics,  which 
he  had  followed  ever  since  in  Paris  he  had  witnessed 
the  outbreak  of  the  Franco-Prussian  War,  or  na- 
tional politics,  or  state  politics,  or,  in  default  of  a 
larger  interest,  local  politics,  which  in  Ohio,  as  no 
doubt  elsewhere,  sometimes  looms  largest  and  most 
important  of  all,  because,  perhaps,  as  De  Tocque- 
ville  says,  local  assemblies  constitute  the  strength  of 
free  institutions. 

My  grandfather  was  then,  at  the  time  of  which 
I  am  thinking  even  if  I  am  not  very  specifically 
writing  about  it,  mayor — and  continued  to  be  mayor 
for  four  terms.  It  was  an  office  that  was  suited,  no 
doubt,  to  the  leisure  of  his  retirement,  and  while  it 
gave  him  the  feeling  of  being  occupied  in  public  af- 
fairs, it  nevertheless  left  him  opportunities  enough 
for  his  German  poets,  and  for  his  horses  and  his 

26 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

farm  out  at  Cable,  and  the  strawberries  he  was  be- 
ginning to  cultivate  with  the  enthusiasm  of  an  ama- 
teur. 

In  such  an  atmosphere  as  that  in  the  Ohio  of  those 
days  it  was  natural  to  be  a  Republican ;  it  was  more 
than  that,  it  was  inevitable  that  one  should  be  a  Re- 
publican; it  was  not  a  matter  of  intellectual  choice, 
it  was  a  process  of  biological  selection.  The  Repub- 
lican party  was  not  a  faction,  not  a  group,  not  a 
wing,  it  was  an  institution  like  those  Emerson  speaks 
of  in  his  essay  on  Politics,  rooted  like  oak-trees  in 
the  center  around  which  men  group  themselves  as 
best  they  can.  It  was  a  fundamental  and  self-evi- 
dent thing,  like  life,  and  liberty,  and  the  pursuit  of 
happiness,  or  like  the  flag,  or  the  federal  judiciary. 
It  was  elemental,  like  gravity,  the  sun,  the  stars,  the 
ocean.  It  was  merely  a  synonym  for  patriotism,  an- 
other name  for  the  nation.  One  became,  in  Urbana 
and  in  Ohio  for  many  years,  a  Republican  just  as  the 
Eskimo  dons  fur  clothes.  It  was  inconceivable  that 
any  self-respecting  person  should  be  a  Democrat. 
There  were,  perhaps,  Democrats  in  Lighttown;  but 
then  there  were  rebels  in  Alabama,  and  in  the  Ku- 
klux  Klan,  about  which  we  read  in  the  evening,  in 
the  Cincinnati  Gazette. 

One  of  the  perplexing  and  confounding  anomalies 
of  existence  was  the  fact  that  our  neighbor,  Mr. 
L ,  was  a  Democrat.  That  fact  perhaps  ex- 
plained to  me  why  he  walked  so  modestly,  so  unob- 
trusively, in  the  shade,  so  close  to  the  picket  fences 
of  Reynolds  Street,  with  his  head  bowed.  I  sup- 
posed that,  being  a  Democrat,  it  was  only  natural 

27 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

for  him  to  slink  along.  He  was  a  lawyer  and  a 
gentleman;  my  grandfather  spoke  with  him,  but 
from  my  mind  I  could  never  banish  the  fact  that 
he  was  a  Democrat,  and  to  explain  his  bent,  thought- 
ful attitude  I  imagined  another  reason  than  the 
fact  that  he  was  a  meditative,  studious  man. 

Lawyers,  of  course,  were  Republicans,  else  how 
could  they  deliver  patriotic  addresses  on  Decora- 
tion Day  and  at  the  reunions  of  the  66th  regiment? 
It  was  natural  for  a  young  man  to  be  a  lawyer,  then 
to  be  elected  prosecuting  attorney,  then  to  go  to  the 
legislature,  then  to  congress,  then — governor,  sena- 
tor, president.  They  could  not,  of  course,  go  any 
more  to  war  and  fight  for  liberty;  that  distinction 
was  no  longer,  unhappily,  possible,  but  they  could 
be  Republicans.  The  Republican  party  had  saved 
the  Union,  won  liberty  for  all  men,  and  there  was 
nothing  left  for  the  patriotic  to  do  but  to  extol  that 
party,  and  to  see  to  it  that  its  members  held  office 
under  the  government. 

In  those  days  the  party  had  many  leaders  in 
Ohio  who  had  served  the  nation  in  military  or  civil 
capacity  during  the  great  crisis;  scarcely  a  county 
that  had  not  some  colonel  or  general  whose  per- 
sonality impressed  the  popular  imagination;  they 
were  looked  up  to,  and  revered,  and  in  the  political 
campaigns  their  faces,  pale  or  red  in  the  flare  of 
the  torches  of  those  vast  and  tumultuous  proces- 
sions that  still  staged  the  political  contest  in  the 
terms  of  war,  looked  down  from  the  festooned  plat- 
forms in  every  public  square.  And  yet  they  were 
already  remote,  statuesque,  oracular,  and  there  was 

28 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

the  reverent  sense  that  somehow  placed  them  in  the 
ideal  past,  whose  problems  had  all  been  happily 
solved,  rather  than  in  the  real  present. 


But  up  in  the  northwestern  part  of  the  state, 
still  referred  to,  even  in  days  so  late  as  those,  with 
something  of  the  humorous  contempt  that  attached 
to  the  term,  as  the  Black  Swamp,  there  had  risen 
a  young,  fiery,  and  romantic  figure  who  ignored  the 
past  and  flung  himself  with  fierce  ardor  into  a  new 
campaign  for  liberty.  His  words  fell  strangely  on 
ears  that  were  accustomed  to  the  reassurance  that 
liberty  was  at  last  conquered,  and  his  doctrines  per- 
plexed and  irritated  minds  that  had  sunk  into  the 
shallow  optimism  of  a  belief  that  there  were  no  more 
liberations  needed  in  the  world.  It  was  not  a  new 
cry,  indeed,  that  he  raised,  but  an  old  one  thought 
to  have  been  stilled,  and  the  standard  he  lifted  in 
the  Black  Swamp  was  looked  upon  by  many  Ohioans 
as  much  askance  as  though  it  were  another  seces- 
sion flag  of  stars  and  bars.  Indeed,  it  had  long 
been  associated  with  the  cause  of  the  conquered 
South,  because  that  section,  by  reason  of  its  eco- 
nomic conditions,  had  long  espoused  the  principle  of 
Free  Trade. 

This  young  man  was  Frank  Hunt  Hurd,  then 
the  congressman  from  the  Toledo  district,  and  in 
that  city,  where  my  father  was  the  pastor  of  a 
church,  he  had  won  many  followers  and  adherents, 

29 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

though  not  enough  to  keep  him  continually  in  his 
seat  in  the  House  of  Representatives. 

He  served  for  several  alternate  terms,  the  in- 
terims being  filled  by  some  orthodox  nonentity,  who 
was  so  speedily  forgotten  that  there  must  have  been 
an  impression  that  for  years  our  district  was  rep- 
resented by  this  one  man. 

I  had  heard  of  him  with  that  dim  sense  of  his 
position  which  a  boy  has  of  any  public  character, 
but  I  had  a  real  vivid  conception  of  him  after  that 
Fourth  of  July  when,  during  a  citizens'  celebration 
which  must  have  been  so  far  patriotic  as  to  forget, 
for  a  time,  partizanism,  and  to  remember  patri- 
otism sufficiently  to  include  the  Democrats,  I  saw 
him  conducted  to  the  platform  by  our  distinguished 
citizen,  David  R.  Locke,  whom  the  world  knew  as 
"Petroleum  V.  Nasby." 

He  delivered  a  patriotic  oration,  and  anyone, — 
even  though  he  were  but  a  wondering  boy  quite  by 
chance  in  attendance,  standing  on  the  outskirts  of 
the  crowd,  following  some  whim  which  for  a  while 
kept  him  from  his  sports, — anyone  who  ever  heard 
Frank  Hurd  deliver  an  oration  never  forgot  it  after- 
ward. 

I  have  no  idea  now  what  it  was  he  said,  perhaps 
I  had  as  little  then,  but  his  black  hair,  his  hand- 
some face,  his  beautiful  voice,  and  the  majestic  mu- 
sic of  his  rolling  phrases  were  wholly  and  com- 
pletely charming.  He  was  explicitly  an  orator,  a 
student  of  the  great  art,  and  he  formed  his  orations 
on  the  ancient  Greek  models,  writing  them  out  with 
exordium,  proposition,  and  peroration,  and  while  he 

30 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

did  not  perhaps  exactly  commit  them  to  memory, 
he,  nevertheless,  in  the  process  of  preparing  them, 
so  completely  possessed  himself  of  them  that  he 
poured  forth  his  polished  sentences  without  a  flaw. 

His  speech  on  Free  Trade,  delivered  in  the  House 
of  Representatives,  February  18,  1881,  remains  the 
classic  on  that  subject,  ranking  with  Henry  Clay's 
speech  on  "The  American  System,"  delivered  in  the 
Senate  in  1832.  In  that  address  Frank  Hurd  be- 
gan with  the  phrase,  "The  tariff  is  a  tax,"  which  ac- 
quired much  currency  years  after  when  Grover 
Cleveland  used  it. 

Everyone,  or  nearly  everyone,  told  me  of  course 
that  Frank  Hurd  was  wrong,  if  he  was  not,  indeed, 
wicked,  and  the  subject  possessed  a  kind  of  fascina- 
tion for  me.  In  thinking  of  it,  or  in  trying  to  think 
of  it,  I  only  perplexed  myself  more  deeply,  until  at 
last  I  reached  the  formidable,  the  momentous  de- 
cision of  taking  my  perplexities  to  Frank  Hurd  him- 
self, and  of  laying  them  before  him. 

I  was  by  this  time  a  youth  of  eighteen,  and  in 
the  summer  when  he  had  come  home  from  Wash- 
ington I  somehow  found  courage  enough  to  go  to 
the  hotel  where  he  lived,  and  to  inquire  for  him.  He 
was  there  in  the  lobby,  standing  by  the  cigar-stand, 
talking  to  some  men,  and  I  hung  on  the  outskirts  of 
the  little  group  until  it  broke  up,  and  then  the 
fear  I  had  felt  vanished  when  he  turned  and  smiled 
upon  me.  I  told  him  that  I  wished  to  know  about 
Free  Trade,  and  since  there  was  nothing  he  liked 
better  to  talk  about,  and  too,  since  there  were  few 
who  could  talk  better  about  anything  than  he  could 

81 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

talk  about  the  tariff,  we  sat  in  the  big  leather  chairs 
while  he  discoursed  simply  on  the  subject.  It  was 
the  first  of  several  of  these  conversations,  or  les- 
sons, which  we  had  in  the  big  leather  chairs  in  the 
lobby  of  the  old  Boody  House,  and  it  was  not  long 
until  I  was  able,  with  a  solemn  pride,  to  announce 
at  home  that  I  was  a  Free-Trader  and  a  Demo- 
crat. 

It  could  hardly  have  been  worse  had  I  announced 
that  I  had  been  visiting  Ingersoll,  and  was  an  athe- 
ist. Cleveland  was  president,  and  in  time  he  sent 
his  famous  tariff  reform  message  to  Congress,  and 
though  I  could  not  vote,  I  was  preparing  to  give 
him  my  moral  support,  to  wear  his  badge,  and  even, 
if  I  could  do  no  more,  to  refuse  to  march  in  the  Re- 
publican processions  with  the  club  of  young  men 
and  boys  organized  in  our  neighborhood. 

For  the  first  time  in  my  life  I  went  on  my  vaca- 
tion trip  to  Urbana  that  summer  with  reluctance, 
for  the  first  time  in  my  life  I  shrank  from  seeing 
my  grandfather.  The  wide  front  floor  opened,  and 
from  the  heat  without  to  the  dark  and  cool  interior 
of  the  hall  I  stepped ;  I  prolonged  the  preliminaries, 
I  went  through  the  familiar  apartments,  and  out 
into  the  garden  to  see  how  it  grew  that  summer, 
and  down  to  the  stable  to  see  the  horses;  but  the 
inevitable  hour  drew  on,  and  at  last,  with  all  the 
trivial  things  said,  all  the  personal  questions  asked, 
we  sat  in  the  living-room,  cool  in  the  half-light  pro- 
duced by  its  drawn  shades,  the  soft  air  of  summer 
blowing  through  it,  the  odd  old  Nuremberg  furni- 
ture, the  painting  of  the  Nuremberg  castle  presented 

32 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

to  my  grandfather  by  the  American  artist  whom  he 
had  rescued  from  a  scrape,  the  tall  pier  glass,  with 
the  little  vase  of  flowers  on  its  marble  base,  and  my 
grandfather  in  his  large  chair,  his  white  waistcoat 
half  unbuttoned  and  one  side  sagging  with  the  weight 
of  the  heavy  watch-chain  that  descended  from  its 
large  hook,  his  white  beard  trimmed  a  little  more 
closely,  his  white  hair  bristling  as  aggressively  as 
ever — all  the  same,  all  as  of  old,  like  the  reminders  of 
the  old  life  and  all  its  traditions  now  to  be  broken 
and  rendered  forever  and  tragically  different  from 
all  it  had  been  and  meant.  He  sat  there  looking  at 
me,  the  blue  eyes  twinkling  under  their  shaggy 
brows,  and  stretched  forth  his  long  white  hand  in 
the  odd  gesture  with  which  he  began  his  conversa- 
tions. Conversations  with  him,  it  suddenly  de- 
veloped, were  not  easy  to  sustain;  he  pursued  the 
Socratic  method.  If  you  disagreed  with  him,  he 
lifted  three  fingers  toward  you,  whether  in  menace 
or  in  benediction  it  was  difficult  at  times  to  deter- 
mine, and  said: 

"Let  me  instruct  you." 

For  instance: 

"Do  you  know  why  Napoleon  III.  lost  the  battle 
of  Sedan?"  he  might  abruptly  inquire. 

"No,  sir,"  you  were  expected  to  say.  (You  al- 
ways addressed  him  as  "sir.") 

"Let  me  instruct  you." 

Or: 

"Do  you  know  who  was  the  greatest  English 
poet?" 

"No,  sir,"  you  would  say,  or,  perhaps,  in  those 
33 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

days  you  might  venture,  "Was  it  Shakespeare, 
sir?"   * 

Then  he  would  look  at  you  and  say : 

"Let  me  instruct  you." 

This  afternoon  then,  after  I  had  inspected  the 
premises,  noticed  how  much  taller  my  cousin's  fir- 
tree  was  than  the  one  I  called  mine  (we  had  planted 
them  one  day,  as  little  boys,  years  before),  and 
after  I  had  had  a  drink  at  the  old  pump,  which  in 
those  days,  before  germs,  brought  up  such  cold, 
clear  water,  and  after  I  had  ascended  to  my  cool 
room  up  stairs,  and  come  downstairs  again,  and 
we  had  idly  talked  for  a  little  while,  as  I  said,  he 
sat  and  looked  at  me  a  moment,  and  then  said : 

"Do  you  understand  this  tariff  question?" 

In  those  days  I  might  have  made  the  due,  what  I 
might  term  with  reference  to  that  situation,  the 
conventional  reply,  and  so  have  said: 

"No,  sir." 

In  these  days  I  am  sure  I  should.  But  I  hesi- 
tated.     He  had  already   stretched  forth  his  hand. 

"Yes,  sir,"  I  said. 

He  drew  in  his  hand,  and  for  an  instant  touched 
with  his  long  fingers  the  end  of  his  large  nose.  I 
plunged    ahead. 

"I  am  in  favor  of  Free  Trade,  sir." 

He  did  not  extend  his  hand.  He  looked  at  me 
a  moment,  and  then  he  said: 

"You  are  quite  right ;  we  must  support  Mr.  Cleve- 
land in  the  coming  contest."       % 

And  then  he  sank  back  in  his  chair  and  laughed. 

He  was  always  like  that,  following  the  truth  as 
34 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

he  saw  it,  wherever  it  led  him.  But  his  active  days 
were  not  many  after  that ;  ere  long  he  was  kicked  by 
one  of  his  horses,  a  vicious  animal,  half  bronco, 
which  he  insisted  on  riding,  and  he  was  invalided  for 
the  rest  of  his  days.  He  spent  them  in  a  wheel- 
chair, pushed  about  by  a  negro  boy.  It  was  a  cross 
he  bore  bravely  enough,  without  complaint,  spending 
his  hours  in  reading  cff  politics,  now  that  he  could 
no  longer  participate  in  them,  and  more  and  more 
in  reading  verse,  and  even  in  committing  it  to  mem- 
ory, so  that  to  the  surprise  of  his  family  he  soon 
replaced  the  grace  he  had  always  said  at  table  with 
some  recited  stanza  of  poetry,  and  he  took  to  cul- 
tivating, or  to  sitting  in  his  chair  while  there  was 
cultivated,  under  his  direction,  a  little  rose  garden. 
He  knew  all  those  roses  as  though  they  were  living 
persons :  when  a  lady  called, — if  the  roses  were  in 
bloom, — he  would  say  to  his  colored  house-boy: 

"Go  cut  off  Madame  Maintenon,  and  bring  her 
here." 

Then  he  would  present  Madame  Maintenon  to 
the  caller  with  such  a  bow  as  he  could  make  in  his 
chair,  and  an  apology  for  not  rising.  He  was  pa- 
tient and  brave,  yet  he  did  not  like  to  feel  the 
scepter  passing  from  him,  and  he  resented  what  he 
considered  interferences  with  his  liberties.  One  day 
when  he  had  returned  from  a  visit  to  an  old  friend, 
to  whose  home  his  colored  boy  had  wheeled  him, 
one  of  his  daughters  asked,  in  a  somewhat  exag- 
gerated tone  of  propitiation: 

"Well,  Father,  how  did  you  find  Mr.  Hovey?" 

"I  found  him  master  of  his  own  house !"  he  blazed. 
35 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

In  1896  he  supported  Mr.  Bryan,  and  his  Repub- 
lican neighbors  said: 

"Poor  old  Major  Brand!  His  mind  must  be  af- 
fected!" 

It  was  an  effort  for  him  to  get  out  to  the  polls, 
but  he  went,  beholding  in  that  conflict,  as  he  could 
in  any  conflict  however  confused  and  clouded,  the 
issue  of  free  men  above  any1  other  issue.  He  did 
not  get  out  much  after  that,  even  when  that  last 
summer  the  few  remnants  of  the  66th  regiment  gath- 
ered in  Urbana  to  hold  the  annual  reunion.  He 
could  not  so  much  as  get  up  town  to  greet  his  old 
comrades,  and  they  sent  word  that  in  the  afternoon 
they  would  march  in  review  before  his  home.  He 
was  wheeled  out  on  the  veranda,  and  there  he  sat 
while  his  old  regiment,  the  fifty  or  sixty  gray, 
broken  men,  marched  past.  They  saluted  as  they 
went  by,  and  he  returned  the  salutes  with  tears 
streaming  down  the  cheeks  where  I  had  never  seen 
tears  before.  And  he  said  with  a  little  choking 
laugh : 

"Why,  look  at  the  boys !" 

It  was  not  long  after,  that  six  of  us,  his  grand- 
sons, bore  him  out  of  the  old  home  forever.  And 
on  his  coffin  were  the  two  things  that  expressed  him 
best,  I  think — his  roses  and  his  flag. 


VI 


The  incalculable  influence  of  the  spoken  word  and 
the  consequent  responsibility  that  weighs  upon  the 

36 


FORTY   YEARS    OF   IT 

lightest  phrase  have  so  long  been  urged  that  men 
might  well  go  about  with  their  fingers  on  their  lips, 
oracular  as  presidential  candidates,  deliberating 
each  thought  before  giving  it  wing.  And  yet,  as 
Carlyle  said  of  French  speech,  the  immeasurable 
tide  flows  on  and  ebbs  only  toward  the  small  hours 
of  the  morning.  Though  even  then  in  certain  quar- 
ters, the  tide  does  not  ebb,  and  in  those  hours  truths 
are  sometimes  spoken — for  instance,  by  newspaper 
reporters,  who,  their  night's  work  done,  turn  to  each 
other  for  relaxation  and  speak  those  thoughts  they 
have  not  dared  to  write  in  their  chronicles  of  the 
day  that  is  done.  The  thought  itself  is  only  a 
vagrant,  encountered  along  the  way  back  to  such 
an  evening,  when  a  reporter  uttered  two  little  words 
that  acquired  for  me  a  profound  significance. 

"Oh,  nothing."  Those  were  the  exact  words,  just 
those  two,  and  yet  a  negative  so  simple  contained 
within  itself  such  an  affirmation  of  an  awful  truth, 
that  I  have  never  been  able  to  forget  them,  though 

for    a    time    I    tried.      Charlie    R and    I    had 

gone  one  night,  after  the  paper  had  gone  to  press, 
into  a  little  restaurant  in  Chicago  to  get  some  sup- 
per. It  was  some  time  in  the  year  1891,  and,  in 
our  idle  gossip,  the  hanging  of  the  anarchists,  then 
an  event  so  recent  that  the  reporters  now  and  then 
spoke  of  it,  had  come  up  in  our  talk. 

"Where  were  you  when  that  occurred?"  he  asked. 

"In  Toledo,"  I   answered. 

"What  did  people  think  of  it  there?" 

"Of  the  hanging?" 

"Yes." 

37 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

I  looked  at  him,  I  suppose,  in  some  astonishment. 
What  did  people  in  Toledo  think  of  the  hanging 
of  the  Chicago  anarchists !  Could  any  question  have 
been  more  stupid,  more  banal?  What  did  any 
people,  anywhere,  think  of  it?  What  was  cus- 
tomary, what  was  proper  and  appropriate  and  in- 
dispensable under  such  circumstances?  In  a  word, 
what  was  there  to  do  with  anarchists  except  to 
hang  them?  Really,  I  was  quite  at  a  loss  what  to 
say.  It  seemed  so  superfluous,  so  ridiculous,  as 
though  he  had  asked  what  the  people  in  Toledo 
thought  of  the  world's  being  round,  or  of  the  force 
of  gravity.  More  than  superfluous,  it  was  callous ; 
he  might  as  well  have  asked  what  Toledo  people 
thought  of  the  hanging  of  Haman,  the  son  of  Ham- 
medatha  the  Agagite,  or  of  the  suicide  of  Judas  Is- 
cariot.     And  I  answered  promptly  in  their  defense: 

"Why,  they  thought  it  was  right,  of  course." 

He  had  his  elbows  on  the  table  and  was  lighting 
a  cigarette,  and  as  he  raised  the  match,  his  dark 
face,  with  its  closely  trimmed  pointed  beard,  was 
suddenly  and  vividly  illuminated  by  the  yellow  flame. 
His  eyes  were  lowered,  their  vision  fixed  just  then 
on  the  interesting  process  of  igniting  the  end  of 
the  cigarette.  But  about  his  puckered  lips,  about 
his  narrowed  eyes  there  played  a  little  smile,  faint, 
elusive,  and  yet  of  a  meaning  so  indubitable  that  it 
was  altogether  disconcerting.  And  in  that  instant 
I  wondered — it  could  not  be!  It  was  preposterous, 
absurd ! 

"Why?"  I  asked. 

"Oh,  nothing,"  he  said. 
38 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

The  end  of  the  cigarette  was  glowing,  little  coils 
of  fire  in  the  tiny  particles  of  tobacco;  he  blew  out 
the  match  and  the  smile  disappeared  from  his  face 
with  its  ruddy  illumination,  and  he  tossed  the 
charred  stick  into  his  coffee  cup. 

Were  there,  then,  two  opinions?  Was  it  possi- 
ble that  any  one  doubted?  When  anarchists  were 
in  question!  Still,  on  that  kindly  face  before  me 
there  lingered  the  shadow  of  that  strange  expres- 
sion, inscrutable,  perplexing,  piquing  curiosity. 
And  yet  by  some  strange,  almost  clairvoyant  proc- 
ess, it  had  gradually  acquired  the  effect  of  a  per- 
sistent, irresistible  and  implacable  authority,  in  the 
presence  of  which  one  felt — well,  cheap,  as  though 
there  were  secrets  from  which  one  had  been  ex- 
cluded, as  though  there  were  somewhere  in  this  uni- 
verse a  stupendous  joke  which  alone  of  all  others 
one  lacked  the  wit  to  see.  It  gave  one  a  disturbed, 
uneasy  sensation,  a  mauvaise  honte. 

The  innate  sense  of  personal  dignity,  the  instinct 
to.  retire  into  one's  self,  the  affectation  of  repose 
and  self-sufficiency  which  leads  one  lightly  to  wave 
aside  a  subject  one  does  not  understand,  to  pass  it 
over  for  other  and  more  familiar  topics — these  were 
ineffectual.  Curiosity  perhaps  in  a  sense  much  less 
refined  than  that  in  which  Matthew  Arnold  consid- 
ered it  when  he  exalted  it  to  the  plane  of  the  higher 
virtues,  broke  down  reticence,  and,  at  last  I  asked, 
and  even  begged  my  companion  to  tell  me  what  he 
meant.  But  he  was  implacable;  he  had  reached,  it 
appeared,  a  stage  of  development  in  which  the 
opinions  of  others  were  of  no  consequence;  an  alti- 

39 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

tude  from  which  he  could  regard  the  race  of  men 
impersonally,  and  permit  them  to  stumble  on  in 
error,  without  the  desire  to  set  them  right.  It  was 
quite  useless  to  question  him,  and  in  the  end  the 
only  satisfaction  he  would  give  me  was  to  say,  with 
an  effort  of  dismissing  the  subject: 

"Ask  some  of  the  boys." 

For  a  young  citizen  to  whom  society  is  yet  an 
illusion,  lying,  in  Emerson's  figure,  before  him  in 
rigid  repose,  with  certain  names,  men  and  institu- 
tions rooted  like  oak  trees  to  the  center,  round 
which  all  arrange  themselves  the  best  they  can,  to 
have  one  of  those  oak  trees  torn  violently  up  by 
the  roots,  is  to  experience  a  distinct  shock.  And 
by  two  words,  and  an  expression  that  played  for 
an  instant  in  lowered  eyes,  and  about  lips  that  were 
more  concerned  just  then  with  the  flattened  end  of 
a  fresh  cigarette  than  the  divulgence  of  great 
truths !  Yes,  decidedly  a  shock,  to  leave  one  shaken 
for  days.  If  there  were  any  doubt  as  to  what  to 
do  with  anarchists,  what  was  the  use  of  going  on 
with  the  study  of  the  law?  I  went  out  from  that 
cheap  little  restaurant  in  Fifth  Avenue,  into  Chi- 
cago's depressing  midnight  streets — and  the  oak  tree 

never    took    root    again.      For,    as    Charlie    R 

had  lightly  suggested,  I  asked  the  boys,  and  by  the 
boys  he  meant,  of  course,  the  reporters. 

They  were  boys  in  spirit,  though  in  the  knowledge 
of  this  world  they  were  as  aged  men,  some  of  whom 
had  seen  so  much  of  life  that  they  were  able  to  dwell 
with  it  only  by  refusing  any  longer  to  accept  it  seri- 
ously.    They  formed  in  that  day  an  unusual  group, 

40 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

gathered  in  the  old  Whitechapel  Club,  and  many  of 
their  names  have  since  become  known  to  literature. 
They,  or  most  of  them,  had  worked  on  the  anar- 
chist cases,  from  the  days  of  the  strike  in  McCor- 
mick's  reaper  works,  down  to  the  night  when  the 
vivid  pen  of  Charlie  Seymour  could  describe  the 
spark  that  soared  in  a  parabolic  curve  from  the  al- 
ley into  Haymarket  Square,  and  then  to  the  black 
morning  of  the  hanging ;  and  they  knew. 

It  was  all  very  simple,  too.  If  it  were  not  for 
the  tragedy,  and  the  wrong  that  is  so  much  worse 
than  any  tragedy,  one  might  almost  laugh  at  the 
simplicity.  It  shows  the  power  of  words,  the  force 
of  phrases,  the  obdurate  and  terrible  tyranny  of 
a  term.  The  men  who  had  been  hanged  were  called 
anarchists,  when,  as  it  happens,  they  were  men,  just 
men.  And  out  of  that  original  error  in  terminology 
there  was  evolved  that  overmastering  fear  which 
raved  and  slew  in  a  frenzy  of  passion  that  decades 
hence  will  puzzle  the  psychologist  who  studies  the 
mind  of  the  crowd.  And  the  student  of  ethics  will 
find  in  the  event  another  proof  of  the  inerrancy 
and  power  of  that  old  law  of  moral  action  and  re- 
action, according  to  which  hatred  ceaseth  not  by 
hatred,  but  by  love  alone.  It  may  be  found  stated 
accurately  and  simply  in  the  Sermon  on  the  Mount, 
and  there  is  still  hope  that  Christendom,  after  an- 
other thousand  years  or  so,  may  discover  it,  and 
drawing  therefrom  the  law  of  social  relations,  apply 
it  to  human  affairs,  and  so  solve  the  problems  that 
trouble  and  perplex  mankind. 

41 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 


VII 


In  speaking  of  the  group  of  newspaper  writers 
who  formed  the  Whitechapel  Club,  augmented  as 
they  were  by  artists,  and  musicians  and  physicians 
and  lawyers,  I  would  not  give  the  impression  that 
they  were  in  any  sense  reformers,  or  actuated  by 
the  smug  and  forbidding  spirit  which  too  often  in- 
spires that  species.  They  were,  indeed,  wisely  other- 
wise, and  they  were,  I  think,  wholly  right  minded 
in  their  attitude  toward  what  are  called  public  ques- 
tions, and  of  these  they  had  a  deep  and  perspicacious 
understanding,  and  it  will  be  easy  to  imagine  that 
the  cursory  comments  on  passing  phases  of  the  hu- 
man spectacle  of  such  minds  as  those  of  Charles 
Goodyear  Seymour,  Finley  Peter  Dunne,  George 
Ade,  Ben  King,  Opie  Reed,  Alfred  Henry  Lewis,  and 
his  brother  William  E.  Lewis,  Frederick  Upham  Ad- 
ams, Thomas  E.  Powers,  Horace  Taylor,  Wallace 
Rice,  Arthur  Henry,  and  a  score  of  others  were 
apt  to  be  entertaining  and  instructive,  though  they 
were  uttered  with  such  wit  and  humor  that  they 
were  never  intended  to  be  instructive. 

The  club  had  been  founded  late  in  the  eighties, 
and  although  it  endured  less  than  ten  years,  it  still 
lives  in  the  minds  of  newspaper  and  literary  men 
as  one  of  the  most  remarkable  of  Bohemian  clubs. 
It  had  its  rooms  in  the  rear  of  a  little  saloon,  con- 
ducted by  Henry  Koster  in  "newspaper  alley,"  as 
Calhoun  Place  was  more  generally  called,  near  the 
buildings   of   the   Chicago  News   and  the   Chicago 

42 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

Herald,  and  it  somehow  gathered  to  itself  many  of 
the  clever  men  of  Chicago  who  were  writing  for 
the  press,  and  a  few  intimate  spirits  in  other  lines 
of  work,  but  of  sympathetic  spirit.  For  a  while  the 
club  was  nameless,  but  one  afternoon  a  group  were 
sitting  in  one  of  the  rooms  when  a  newsboy  passed 
through  the  alley  and  cried:  "All  about  the  latest 
Whitechapel  murder!"  Seymour  paused  with  a 
stein  of  beer  half  lifted,  and  said:  "We'll  call  the 
new  club  the  'Whitechapel  Club.'  " 

I  suppose  the  grewsome  connotations  of  the  name 
led  to  our  practice  of  collecting  relics  of  the  trage- 
dies we  were  constantly  reporting.  When  he  came 
back  from  the  Dakotas,  where  he  had  been  reporting 
the  Sioux  War,  Seymour  brought  back  from  the 
battles  a  number  of  skulls  of  Indians,  and  blankets 
drenched  in  blood,  which  were  hung  on  the  walls 
of  the  club.  From  that  time  on  it  became  the  prac- 
tice of  sheriffs  and  newspaper  men  everywhere  to 
send  anything  of  that  kind  to  the  Whitechapel  Club. 
The  result  was  that  within  a  few  years  it  had  a 
large  collection  of  skulls  of  criminals,  and  some 
physicians  discovered,  or  thought  they  discovered, 
differences  between  these  skulls  and  the  skulls  of 
those  who  were  not  criminals,  or,  if  they  were,  had 
not  been  caught  at  it. 

These  and  the  ropes  of  hangmen  and  the  various 
mementos  of  crimes  were  the  decorations  of  the  club 
rooms,  and  on  Saturday  nights  the  hollow  eyes  of 
those  skulls  looked  down  on  many  a  lively  scene. 

Admission  to  the  club  was  obtained  in  a  peculiar 
way.     An  applicant  for  membership  had  his  name 

43 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

proposed,  and  it  was  then  posted  on  a  bulletin- 
board.  He  was  on  probation  for  thirty  days,  dur- 
ing which  he  had  to  be  at  the  club  at  least  five  days 
in  the  week,  in  order  to  become  acquainted  with  the 
members.  Within  that  time  any  member  could  tear 
his  name  down,  and  that  ended  his  candidacy. 
When  his  name  finally  came  up  for  voting  it  re- 
quired the  full  vote  of  the  club  to  get  him  in. 

And  then  we  grew  prosperous,  and  acquiring  a 
building  farther  down  the  alley,  we  had  it  decorated 
in  a  somber  manner,  with  a  notable  table,  shaped  like 
a  coffin,  around  which  we  gathered.  But  the  pros- 
perity and  the  fame  of  the  club  led  to  its  end.  Rich 
and  important  men  of  Chicago  sought  membership. 
Some  were  admitted,  then  more,  and  as  a  result  the 
club  lost  its  Bohemian  character,  and  finally  dis- 
banded. 


VIII 

Those  who  are  able  to  recall  the  symposium  of 
these  minds  will  no  doubt  always  see  the  humorous 
face  of  Charlie  Seymour  as  the  center  of  the  coterie, 
a  young  man  with  such  a  flair  for  what  was  news, 
with  such  an  instinct  for  word  values,  such  real 
ability  as  a  writer,  and  such  a  quaint  and  original 
strain  of  humor  as  to  make  him  the  peer  of  any, 
a  young  man  who  would  have  gone  far  and  high 
could  he  have  lived.  An  early  fate  overtook  him, 
as  it  overtook  Charlie  Perkins  and  Charlie  Almy 
and  Ben  King,  but  their  fate  had  the  mellowing  kind- 

44 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

ness  of  the  fact  that  all  who  knew  them  can  never 
think  of  them,  with  however  much  regret,  without 
a  smile  at  some  remembered  instance  of  their  un- 
failing humor. 

When  I  mentioned  them,  I  had  fully  intended  to 
give  some  instances  of  that  humor,  but  when  it  was 
not  of  a  raciness,  it  was  of  such  a  rare  and  delicate 
charm,  such  a  fleeting,  evanescent  quality,  that  it  is 
impossible  to  separate  it  from  all  that  was  going  on 
about  it.  It  is  easy  enough  to  recall  if  not  to  evoke 
again  the  scene  in  which  Ben  King  and  Charlie  Almy, 
sitting  for  three  hours  at  a  stretch,  gave  a  wholly 
impromptu  impersonation  of  two  solemn  mission- 
aries just  returned  from  some  unmapped  wilderness 
and  recounting  their  deeds  in  order  to  inspire  con- 
tributions; it  is  not  difficult  either  to  recall  the 
slight  figure  of  Charlie  Seymour,  with  his  red  hair, 
his  comedian's  droll  face,  and  to  listen  to  him  re- 
counting those  adventures  which  life  was  ever  offer- 
ing him,  whether  on  one  of  his  many  journeys  as 
a  war  correspondent  to  the  region  of  the  Dakotas 
when  his  friends  among  the  Ogallalla  and  Brule 
Sioux  were  on  the  war-path  again,  or  in  some  less 
picturesque  tragedy  he  had  been  reporting  nearer 
home — say  a  murder  in  South  Clark  Street ;  but, 
like  so  many  of  the  keener  joys  of  life,  the  charm 
of  his  stories  was  fleeting  and  gone  with  the  mo- 
ment that  gave  them. 

His  humor  colored  everything  he  wrote,  as  the 
humor  of  Finley  Peter  Dunne  colored  everything  he 
wrote;  and  both  were  skilled  in  the  art  of  the  news 
story.     We  were  all  reading  Kipling  in  those  days, 

45 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

and  Mr.  Dunne  was  so  clever  in  adapting  his  terse 
style  to  the  needs  of  the  daily  reportorial  life  that 
when  one  night  a  private  shot  a  comrade  in  the 
barracks  at  Fort  Sheridan,  and  Mr.  Dunne  was  de- 
tailed to  report  the  tragedy,  he  found  it  in  every 
detail  so  exactly  like  Kipling's  story  "In  the  Mat- 
ter of  a  Private,"  that  he  was  overcome  by  the 
despair  of  having  to  write  a  tale  that  had  already 
been  told.  He  resisted  the  temptation,  if  there  was 
any  temptation,  nobly  and  wrote  the  tale  with  a 
bald  simplicity  that  no  doubt  enhanced  its  effect. 
He  had  not  then  begun  to  report  the  Philosophy  of 
Mr.  Dooley,  though  there  was  a  certain  Irishman 
in  Chicago  responsive  to  the  name  of  Colonel 
Thomas  Jefferson  Dolan,  whom,  in  his  capacity  of 
First  Ward  Democrat,  Mr.  Dunne  frequently  inter- 
viewed for  his  paper  without  the  cramping  influences 
of  a  previous  visitation  on  the  Colonel,  and  these 
interviews  showed  much  of  the  color  and  spirit  of 
those  Dooley  articles  which  later  were  to  make  him 
famous.  He  already  knew,  of  course,  and  fre- 
quently enjoyed  communion  with  the  prototype  of 
Mr.  Dooley,  Mr.  James  McGarry,  who  had  a  quaint 
philosophy  of  his  own  which  Mr.  Dunne  one  day 
rendered  in  a  little  article  entitled  "Mr.  McGarry's 
Philosophy."  The  familiarity  so  wounded  Mr. 
McGarry,  however  (he  was  a  man  of  simple  dig- 
nity and  some  sensitiveness),  that  Mr.  Dunne  there- 
after adopted  another  name  for  the  personage 
through  which  he  was  so  long  and  so  brilliantly  to 
express  himself,  though  it  was  not  until  after  the 
Spanish  War  that  the  wide  public  was  to  recognize 

46 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

the  talent  which  was  already  so  abundantly  recog- 
nized by  Mr.  Dunne's  friends. 

Charlie  Seymour  did  not  read  as  much  as  some 
of  his  companions ;  perhaps  it  was  that  fact  that 
gave  such  an  original  flavor  to  what  he  wrote.  His 
elder  brother,  Mr.  Horatio  W.  Seymour,  was  the 
editor  of  the  Herald,  a  newspaper  famed  for  the 
taste  and  even  beauty  of  its  typographical  appear- 
ance. It  looked  somewhat  like  the  New  York  Sun, 
and  under  Mr.  Seymour  was  as  carefully  edited. 
It  was  the  organ  of  the  Democracy  in  the  northwest, 
and  I  suppose  no  direct  or  immediate  influence  was 
more  potent  in  bringing  on  the  wide  Democratic 
victory  in  the  congressional  election  of  1890  than  the 
brilliant  editorials  on  the  tariff  which  Mr.  Horatio 
Seymour  wrote.  They  were,  I  remember,  one  of  the 
delights  of  Frank  Hurd,  and  it  was  through  Hurd's 
influence  that  I  was  on  the  staff  of  that  paper,  re- 
porting political  events. 

We  were  all  more  or  less  employed  in  reporting 
political  events  in  that  stirring  year,  and  were  kept 
busy  in  following  and  recording  the  sayings  of  the 
orators  of  both  parties.  It  was  characteristic  of 
Mr.  Dunne  that  after  a  sober  column  giving  the  gist 
of  a  speech  by  Joseph  B.  Foraker,  then  lately  gov- 
ernor, and  afterward  senator  of  Ohio,  in  which  he 
waved  the  bloody  shirt  in  the  fiery  manner  which  in 
those  days  characterized  him,  Mr.  Dunne  should 
have  concluded  his  article  sententiously :  "Then  the 
audience  went  out  to  get  the  latest  news  of  the  bat- 
tle of  Gettysburg." 

But  it  was  typical  of  Charlie  Seymour  that  when 
47 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

he  was  detailed  to  accompany  Thomas  B.  Reed, 
Speaker  of  the  Billion  Dollar  Congress,  he  should 
have  been  so  fascinated  by  the  whiskers  of  the  Illi- 
nois farmers  who  crowded  about  the  rear  platform 
of  the  Speaker's  train,  that  he  devoted  half  a  column 
to  a  description  of  those  adornments  which  long 
was  celebrated  as  a  classic  in  the  traditions  of  Chi- 
cago reporters,  to  be  recalled  by  them  as  they 
would  recall,  for  instance,  certain  of  the  sayings  of 
the  late  Joseph  Medill. 

Mr.  Medill,  of  course,  moved  in  an  element  far 
above  that  which  was  natural  to  the  reporters,  and 
the  figure  of  the  great  editor  of  the  Tribune  filled 
the  imagination  completely.  I  used  to  like  his  low- 
tariff  editorials,  though  they  became  high-tariff  edi- 
torials during  national  campaigns,  the  rate  of  per- 
centage of  protection  rising  like  a  thermometer  in 
the  heat  of  political  excitement, — a  tendency  the 
rate  invariably  reveals  the  nearer  its  objective  is 
approached. 

Mr.  Medill,  as  was  well  known,  was  not  an  ad- 
mirer of  President  Harrison,  and  there  came  down 
into  our  world  an  evidence  of  the  fact  in  a  story 
which  Mr.  Frank  Brooks,  a  political  writer  on  the 
Tribune,  told  us.  It  was  at  the  time  that  President 
Harrison  made  one  of  those  speaking  tours  which, 
beginning  with  President  Johnson's  "swing  around 
the  circle,"  have  grown  increasingly  familiar  to  those 
of  the  electorate  who  observe  their  presidents  and 
rush  to  the  railway  station  to  hear  them  speaking 
as  they  flash  by.  His  managing  editor  had  as- 
signed Mr.  Brooks  to  go  to  Galesburg,  catch  the 

48 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

President's  special  and  make  the  journey  with  him, 
and  just  as  he  was  giving  directions  as  to  the  column 
or  two  which  Mr.  Brooks  was  to  send  in  daily,  Mr. 
Medill  went  shuffling  through  the  editorial  room, 
bearing  a  great  pile  of  those  foreign  exchanges  he 
was  so  fond  of  reading.  The  managing  editor  ex- 
plained to  Mr.  Medill  the  mission  he  was  committing 
to  Mr.  Brooks,  and  the  old  editor  stood  a  moment 
looking  at  them,  then  raised  his  ear-trumpet  and 
said  in  his  queer  voice: 

"What  did  you  say?" 

"I  said,  I'd  just  been  telling  Mr.  Brooks  to  go 
down  to  Galesburg  to-night,  catch  the  President's 
special,  and  send  us  a  column  or  so  each  night  of 
his  speeches." 

"Uh-huh,"  said  Mr.  Medill,  and  then  he  drily 
added:     "What  for?" 


IX 


It  was,  of  course,  for  a  young  correspondent  who 
had  an  eager  curiosity  about  life,  an  interesting 
experience  to  go  on  a  journey  like  that,  and  it  was 
with  delight  that,  one  snowy  morning  in  the  late 
autumn  of  that  year,  I  left  Chicago  to  go  on  a  little 
trip  down  through  Indiana  with  James  G.  Blaine. 
He  was  the  secretary  of  state  in  President  Harri- 
son's cabinet,  a  position  in  which,  as  it  turned  out, 
he  was  unhappy,  as  most  men  are  apt  to  be  in  public 
positions,  though  a  sort  of  cruel  and  evil  fascina- 
tion will  not  let  them  give  up  the  vain  pursuit  of 
them,  vainest  perhaps  when  they  are  won.     When 

49 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

I  reached  the  station  that  morning,  Mr.  Blaine  was 
already  there,  walking  up  and  down  the  platform 
arm  in  arm  with  his  son  Emmons.  He  was  a  gray 
man,  dressed  in  gray  clothes,  with  spats  made  of  the 
cloth  of  his  habit,  and  there  was  about  him  an  air 
of  vague  sadness,  which  in  his  high  countenance  be- 
came almost  a  pain,  though  just  then,  in  the  com- 
panionship of  the  son  he  loved,  there  was,  for  a 
little  while,  the  expression  of  a  mild  happiness,  may- 
be a  solace.  His  face  was  of  a  grayish,  almost  lumi- 
nous pallor,  and  his  silver  hair  and  beard  were  in 
the  same  key.  William  Walter  Phelps,  then  our 
minister  to  Germany,  was  traveling  with  him,  and 
on  our  way  down  to  South  Bend  the  constant  en- 
trance of  plain  citizens  from  the  other  coaches  into 
our  car  filled  Mr.  Phelps  with  a  kind  of  wonder. 
Commercial  travelers,  farmers,  all  sorts  and  condi- 
tions of  men,  entered  and  introduced  themselves  to 
Mr.  Blaine,  and  he  sat  and  talked  with  them  all  in 
that  simplicity  which  marks  the  manners,  even  if  it 
has  departed  the  spirit  of  the  republic. 

"It  is  a  remarkable  sight  you  are  witnessing,"  said 
Mr.  Phelps  to  us  reporters,  "a  sight  you  could  wit- 
ness in  no  other  country  in  the  world.  There  is  the 
premier  of  a  great  government,  and  yet  the  com- 
monest man  may  approach  him  without  ceremony, 
and  talk  to  him  as  though  he  were  nobody." 

Fresh  from  his  life  at  a  foreign  court,  he  was 
viewing  events  from  that  foreign  point  of  view,  per- 
haps thinking  just  then  in  European  sequences,  and 
since  there  was  such  simplicity,  it  was  not  hard  for 
any  of  us  to  have  conversation  with  our  premier. 

50 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

Mr.  Blaine  had  just  come  from  Ohio  where  he  had 
been  speaking  in  McKinley's  district,  and  he  under- 
stood the  political  situation  so  perfectly  that  he  said, 
in  the  frankness  of  a  conversation  that  was  not  to  be 
reported,  that  McKinley  was  certain  to  be  defeated ; 
indeed  he  foresaw,  though  it  required  no  very  great 
vision  to  do  that,  the  reverse  that  was  to  overtake 
his  party  in  the  congressional  elections. 

With  my  interest  in  the  tariff  question,  which  then 
seemed  to  me  so  fundamental,  I  did  not  lose  the 
opportunity  to  ask  Mr.  Blaine  about  his  reciprocity 
project;  but  after  a  while  the  conversation  turned 
to  more  personal  subjects.  When  he  learned  that  I 
was  from  Ohio,  he  asked  me  suddenly  if  I  could  name 
the  counties  that  formed  the  several  congressional 
districts  of  the  state.  I  could  not,  of  course,  do 
that,  and  I  supposed  no  one  in  the  world  could  do 
it  or  ever  wish  to  do  it;  but  he  could,  and  with  a 
naive  pride  in  the  accomplishment  he  did,  and  then 
astounded  me  by  saying  that  he  could  almost  match 
the  feat  with  any  state  in  the  Union. 

It  was  the  only  enthusiasm  the  poor  man  showed 
all  that  day,  and  when  we  reached  South  Bend,  there 
was  a  contretemps  that  might  have  afforded  Mr. 
Phelps  further  food  for  reflection  on  the  lack  of  cere- 
mony in  America.  When  the  premier  stepped  off 
the  train  into  the  wet  mass  of  snow  that  covered  the 
dirty  platform  of  the  ugly  little  station,  there  was 
nowhere  to  be  seen  any  evidence  of  a  reception  for 
the  distinguished  guest.  There  was  an  old  hack,  or 
'bus,  one  of  those  rattling,  shambling,  moth-eaten 
vehicles  that  await  the  incoming  train  at  every  small 

51 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

town  in  our  land,  with  a  team  of  forlorn  horses  de- 
pressed by  the  weather  or  by  life,  but  there  was  no 
committee  of  eminent  citizens,  no  band,  nothing. 
The  scene  was  bare  and  bleak  and  cold,  and  the 
premier  was  plainly  disgusted. 

He  stood  there  a  moment  and  looked  about  him 
undecided,  while  Mr.  Phelps  with  sympathetic  con- 
cern displayed  great  willingness  to  serve,  but  was  as 
helpless  as  his  chief.  The  American  sovereigns  who 
were  loafing  by  the  station  shed  looked  on  with  the 
reticent  detachment  which  characterizes  the  rural 
American.  And  then  the  train  slowly  pulled  out  and 
left  us,  and  Mr.  Blaine  cast  at  it  a  glance  of  longing 
and  of  reproach,  as  though  in  its  sundering  of  the 
last  tie  with  the  world  of  comfort,  he  had  suffered 
the  final  indignity.  There  seemed  to  be  no  course 
other  than  to  take  the  'bus,  when  suddenly  a  com- 
mittee rushed  up,  out  of  breath  and  out  of  coun- 
tenance, and  with  a  chorus  of  apologies  explained 
that  they  had  met  the  wrong  train,  or  gone  to  an- 
other station,  and  so  bore  the  premier  off  in  triumph 
to  dine  at  some  rich  man's  house. 

The  day  seemed  to  grow  worse  as  it  progressed,  as 
days  ill  begun  have  a  way  of  doing,  and  when  the 
premier  in  the  afternoon  appeared  at  the  meeting 
he  was  to  address,  his  spirits  had  not  improved,  and 
even  if  they  had,  the  meeting  was  one  to  depress  the 
spirits  of  any  man.  It  assembled  in  a  barren  hall, 
a  kind  of  skating  rink,  or  something  of  the  sort,  that 
would  have  served  better  for  a  boxing  match.  The 
audience  was  small,  and  standing  about  in  the  mud 
and  slush  they  had  "tramped  in,"  to  use  our  mid- 
52 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

western  phrase,  they  displayed  that  bucolic  indiffer- 
ence which  can  daunt  the  most  exuberant  speaker. 
It  was  in  no  way  worthy  of  the  man,  and  Mr.  Blaine 
spoke  with  evident  difficulty,  and  so  wholly  lacked 
spirit  and  enthusiasm  that  it  was  impossible  for 
him  to  warm  up  to  his  subject.  The  speech  was  of 
that  perfunctory  sort  which  such  an  atmosphere 
compels,  one  of  those  speeches  the  speaker  drags 
out,  a  word  at  a  time,  and  is  glad  to  be  done  with, 
and  Mr.  Blaine  bore  with  his  fates  a  little  while,  and 
then  almost  abruptly  closed.  He  spoke  on  the  tariff 
issue,  and  in  defense  of  the  McKinley  Bill,  and  in 
marshaling  the  evidences  of  our  glory  and  pros- 
perity, all  of  which  he  attributed  to  the  direct  influ- 
ence of  the  protective  tariff  system,  he  mentioned 
the  number  of  miles  of  railroad  that  had  been  built, 
and  even  the  increase  in  the  nation's  population! 
The  speech  and  the  occasion  afforded  an  oppor- 
tunity to  a  newspaper  of  the  opposition,  which  in 
those  days  of  silly  partizanship,  was  not  to  be  over- 
looked. I  went  back  to  the  little  hotel  and  wrote 
my  story,  and  since  I  had  all  the  while  in  my  mind 
not  only  partizan  advantage,  but  the  smiles  that 
would  break  out  on  the  countenances  of  Charlie 
Seymour  and  Peter  Dunne  and  the  other  boys  gath- 
ered in  the  Whitechapel  Club  I  did  not  minimize 
the  effect  of  all  those  babies  who  had  come  to  life 
as  a  result  of  the  protective  tariff,  nor  all  those 
ironical  difficulties  the  day  had  heaped  upon  the 
great  man.  It  was  not,  perhaps,  quite  fair,  nor  quite 
nice,  but  it  was  as  fair  and  as  nice  as  newspaper  eth- 
ics and  political  etiquette — if  there  are  such  things 

58 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

— require,  and  Mr.  Blaine  himself  must  have  had 
some  consciousness  of  his  partial  failure,  some  dis- 
satisfaction with  his  effort,  for  I  was  just  about 
to  put  my  story  on  the  wire  at  six  o'clock  when  he 
appeared,  with  his  rich  host,  and  asked  for  me.  I 
talked  to  him  through  the  little  wicket  of  the  tele- 
graph office,  and  the  conversation  began  inauspi- 
ciously  by  the  rich  man's  peremptorily  commanding 
me  to  let  him  see  my  stuff;  he  wished,  he  said,  to 
"look  it  over"!  I  was  not  as  patient  with  his  pre- 
sumption then  as  I  think  I  could  be  now,  for  I  had 
not  learned  that  it  was  the  factory  system  that  pro- 
duces such  types,  men  who  bully  the  women  at  home 
and  the  women  and  clerks  and  operatives  in  their 
shops,  and  I  denied  him  the  right,  of  course.  He 
became  very  angry,  and  blustered  through  the  little 
window,  while  the  operator,  an  old  telegrapher  I  had 
known  in  Toledo,  sat  behind  me  waiting  to  send  the 
story  clicking  into  Chicago  on  The  Herald's  wire. 
After  the  rich  man  had  exhausted  himself,  Mr. 
Blaine  took  his  place  at  the  window  and  in  a  mild 
and  calm  manner,  asked  me  for  my  copy,  saying 
that  he  was  not  well,  and  that  he  had  made  some 
slips  in  his  speech  which  he  did  not  care  to  have  go 
to  the  country.  It  was  those  unfortunate  or  fortu- 
nate babies  of  the  protective  tariff  system,  and  he 
said  that  the  correspondent  of  a  press  association 
had  agreed  to  make  the  excisions  if  I  would  do  so, 
and  he  would  consider  it  a  favor  if  I  would  oblige 
him. 

The  charm  of  his  manner  had  been  on  me  all  that 
day,  and  I  had  been  feeling  sorry  for  him  all  day, 

54 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

too,  and  I  was  sorrier  for  him  then  than  ever,  and 
half  ashamed  of  some  of  the  things  I  had  written,  but 
I  explained  to  him  that  I  had  been  sent  by  my  paper 
in  the  hope  that  he  might  say  something  to  the  dis- 
advantage of  his  own  cause,  and  that  my  duty  was 
to  report,  at  least,  what  he  had  said.  It  was  one  of 
the  hardest  "noes"  I  ever  had  to  say,  and  at  last  as 
he  turned  away,  I  regretted,  perhaps  more  than 
he,  and  certainly  more  than  he  ever  knew,  that  I 
could  not  let  him  revise  his  speech — since  that  is 
what  most  of  us  desire  to  do  with  most  of  our 
speeches. 

When  that  campaign  ended  in  the  overthrow  of 
the  Republican  majority  in  Congress,  and  I  was  sent 
to  interview  Ben  Butterworth  on  the  result,  he  said, 
in  his  humorous  way:  "The  Lord  gave,  and  the 
Lord  hath  taken  away;  blessed  be  the  name  of  the 
Lord."  He  was  not  altogether  cast  down  by  the  re- 
sult; in  his  place  in  Congress  as  a  representative 
from  a  Cincinnati  district  he  had  risen  to  denounce 
the  tariff,  and  so  had  his  consolation.  To  me  it 
seemed  as  if  the  people  had  at  last  entered  the  prom- 
ised land,  that  that  was  the  day  the  Lord  had  made 
for  his  people,  but  Mr.  Butterworth  could  point  out 
that  our  government  was  not  so  democratic  as  the 
British  government,  for  instance,  since  it  was  not  so 
responsive  to  the  people's  will.  Over  there,  of 
course,  after  such  a  reverse  the  government  would 
have  retired,  and  a  new  one  would  have  been  formed, 
but  here  the  existing  administration  would  remain  in 
power  two  years  longer,  and  then,  even  if  it  lost  in 
the  presidential  election  over  a  year  must  elapse  be- 

55 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

fore  a  new  Congress  would  convene,  so  that  the  mil- 
lennium was  postponed  a  good  three  years  at  least. 


However,  there  were  other  interests  and  other  de- 
lights with  which  to  occupy  one's  self  meanwhile,  not 
the  least  of  which  was  Mr.  Butterworth  himself. 
He  was  then  out  of  Congress  and  in  Chicago  as  So- 
licitor General  of  the  World's  Columbian  Exposi- 
tion, for  which  Chicago  was  preparing.  For  a  while 
I  was  relieved  from  writing  about  politics,  and  as- 
signed to  the  World's  Fair,  and  there  were  so  many 
distinguished  men  from  all  over  the  nation  associated 
in  that  enterprise  that  it  was  very  much  like  politics 
in  its  superficial  aspects.  There  was,  for  instance, 
the  World's  Columbian  Commission,  a  body  created 
under  the  authority  of  Congress,  composed  of  two 
commissioners  from  each  state,  appointed  by  its 
governor,  and  that  body  exactly  the  size  of  the 
senate  was  like  it  in  personnel  and  character.  The 
witty  Thomas  E.  Palmer  of  Michigan  was  its  presi- 
dent, and  there  were  among  its  membership  such 
men  as  Judge  Lindsay,  later  senator  from  Kentucky, 
Judge  Harris  of  Virginia,  who  looked  like  George 
Washington,  and  many  other  delightful  and  pungent 
characters.  But  no  personality  among  them  all  was 
more  interesting  than  Colonel  James  A.  McKenzie, 
Judge  Lindsay's  colleague  from  Kentucky.  He  was 
tall  and  spare  of  frame,  and  his  long  moustache 
and  goatee,  and  the  great  black  slouch  hat  he  wore 

56 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

made  him  in  appearance  the  typical  southerner  of 
the  popular  imagination.  He  was  indeed  the  typical 
southerner  by  every  right  and  tradition,  by  birth, 
by  his  services  in  the  Confederate  army,  by  his 
stately  courtesy,  by  his  love  of  sentiment  and  the 
picturesque,  by  his  wit  and  humor  and  eloquence, 
and  his  fondness  for  phrases.  His  humor  sparkled  in 
his  kind  blue  eyes,  and  it  overflowed  in  that  bril- 
liant conversation  with  which  he  delighted  every  one 
about  him;  he  could  entertain  you  by  the  hour  with 
his  comments  on  all  phases  of  that  life  in  which  he 
found  such  zest.  He  had  been  known  as  "Quinine 
Jim,"  because  as  congressman  he  had  secured  the 
reduction  or  the  abolition  of  the  duty  on  that  drug, 
so  indispensable  in  malarial  lands.  He  was  fond  of 
striking  phrases ;  he  it  was  who  had  referred  to 
Blaine  as  a  Florentine  mosaic;  and  his  reference  to 
Mrs.  Cleveland  as  "the  uncrowned  queen  of  America" 
had  delighted  the  Democratic  convention  at  St. 
Louis  which  renominated  her  husband  for  the  presi- 
dency. And  again  at  Chicago,  on  that  memorable 
night  of  oratory  in  1892  in  seconding  the  nomination 
of  Cleveland  on  behalf  of  Kentucky  he  stood  on  a 
chair  and  referred  to  his  state  as  the  commonwealth 
"in  which,  thank  God,  the  damned  lie  is  the  first 
lick,  where  the  women  are  so  beautiful  that  the 
aurora  borealis  blushes  with  shame,  where  the 
whiskey  is  so  good  as  to  make  intoxication  a  virtue, 
and  the  horses  so  fleet  that  lightning  in  comparison 
is  but  a  puling  paralytic." 

During  one  of  many  pleasant  afternoons  in  the 
old  Grand  Pacific  Hotel  he  began  to  tell  us  some- 

57 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

thing  about  the  chronic  office  holders  to  be  found  in 
the  capital  of  his  state,  as  in  most  states,  and  said: 
"If  God  in  a  moment  of  enthusiasm  should  see  fit 
to  snatch  them  to  His  bosom  I  should  regard  it  as  a 
dispensation  of  divine  providence  in  which  I  could 
acquiesce  with  a  fervor  that  would  be  turbulent  and 
even  riotous."  It  was  in  this  stream  of  exaggeration 
and  hyperbole  that  he  talked  all  the  time,  but  with 
the  coming  of  the  winter  of  that  year  my  opportuni- 
ties of  listening  to  him  were  cut  off.  I  was  sent  to 
Springfield  to  report  the  sessions  of  the  legislature. 
In  the  spring  a  bill  was  under  discussion  for  the 
appropriation  of  a  large  sum  in  aid  of  the  World's 
Fair,  and  when  the  usual  opposition  developed 
among  those  country  members  who  have  so  long 
governed  our  cities  in  dislike  and  distrust  of  the 
people  in  them,  a  delegation  came  down  from  Chi- 
cago to  lobby  for  the  measure.  It  was  not  long 
until  it  was  evident  that  they  were  not  making 
much  headway;  the  difference,  the  distinction  in 
their  dress  and  manner,  their  somewhat  too  lofty 
style  were  only  making  matters  worse.  I  took  it 
upon  myself  to  telegraph  to  James  W.  Scott,  the 
publisher  of  The  Herald,  apprising  him  of  the  situa- 
tion, and  suggesting  that  Colonel  McKenzie  be  sent 
down  to  reenforce  them.  I  felt  that  he  would  per- 
haps understand  the  country  members  better  because 
he  understood  humanity  better,  and  besides,  I 
wished  to  see  him  again  and  hear  his  stories  and 
funny  sayings.  He  came,  and  after  he  had  asso- 
ciated with  the  members  a  day  or  so,  and  they  had 
seen   him   draw   Kentucky   "twist"    from   the   deep 

58 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

pocket  of  the  long  tails  of  his  coat,  and  on  one  or 
two  occasions  had  watched  him  gently  pinch  into  a 
julep  the  tender  sprigs  of  mint  the  spring  had 
brought  to  Springfield,  the  appropriation  for  some 
reason  was  made.  While  he  was  there  he  said  he 
wished  to  visit  the  tomb  of  Lincoln,  and  it  was  with 
pride  that  I  got  an  open  carriage  and  drove  him,  on 
an  incomparable  morning  in  June,  out  to  Oak  Ridge 
cemetery.  He  was  in  a  solemn  mood  that  morning; 
the  visit  had  a  meaning  for  him;  he  had  fought  on 
the  other  side  in  the  great  war,  but  he  had  a  better 
conception  of  the  character  of  the  noble  martyr  than 
many  a  northerner,  especially  of  the  day  when  that 
tomb  was  built,  certainly  a  nobler  conception  of 
that  lofty  character  than  is  expressed  in  Mead's 
cruel  war  groups — as  though  Lincoln  had  been 
merely  some  shoulder-strapped  murderer  of  his  fel- 
low men !  The  Colonel  had  never  been  there  before, 
and  it  was  an  occasion  for  him,  and  for  me,  too, 
though  every  time  I  went  there  it  was  for  me  an  oc- 
casion, as  my  sojourn  in  Springfield  was  an  oppor- 
tunity, to  induce  those  who  had  known  Lincoln  to 
talk  about  him. 

The  tomb  has  a  chamber  in  its  base  where  there 
were  stored  a  number  of  things ;  the  place,  indeed, 
was  a  sort  of  cheap  museum,  and  you  paid  to  enter 
there  and  listen  to  an  aged  custodian  lecture  on  the 
"relics,"  and  thrill  the  gaping  onlooker  with  the 
details  of  the  attempt  to  steal  the  body,  and  buy  a 
book  about  it,  if  you  were  morbid  and  silly  enough. 
The  custodian  began  his  lecture  in  that  chamber, 
and  then  led  you  out  into  the  sunlight  again,  and 

59 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

up  on  the  base  of  the  monument,  and  showed  you  the 
bronze  fighters,  and  at  last,  took  you  down  into  the 
crypt,  on  the  brow  of  the  little  down  that  overlooks 
the  cemetery. 

There  at  last  Colonel  McKenzie  stood  beside  the 
sarcophagus  and  after  a  while  the  custodian  came 
to  the  end  of  his  rigmarole,  and,  by  some  mercy,  was 
still.  And  I  stood  aside  and  looked  at  the  old  Con- 
federate officer,  standing  there  in  that  cool  entrance, 
beside  the  very  tomb  of  Lincoln.  He  stood  with 
his  arms  folded  on  his  breast,  his  tall  form 
slightly  bent,  his  big  hat  in  his  hand,  and  his 
white  head  bowed;  he  stood  there  a  long  time,  in 
the  perfect  silence  of  that  June  morning,  with 
thoughts,  I  suppose,  that  might  have  made  an 
epic. 

When  at  last  he  turned  away  and  went  around  to 
the  front  of  the  monument,  and  we  were  about  to 
enter  our  carriage,  he  turned,  and  still  uncovered, 
over  the  little  gate  in  the  low  fence  that  enclosed 
the  spot,  he  paused  and  gave  his  hand  to  the  old 
custodian,  and  said: 

"Colonel,  I  wish  to  express  to  you  my  apprecia- 
tion of  the  privilege  I  have  had  this  morning  of 
paying  my  respects  at  the  shrine  of  the  greatest 
American  that  ever  lived." 

He  said  it  solemnly  and  sincerely,  and  then,  still 
holding  the  delighted  old  fellow's  hand,  he  went  on 
in  profound  gravity : 

"And  I  cannot  go  away  without  expressing  my 
sense  of  satisfaction  in  the  eloquent  oration  you  have 
delivered  on  this  occasion.     I  was  particularly  im- 

60 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

pressed,  sir,  by  its  evident  lack  of  previous  thought 
and  preparation." 


XI 


That  was  the  legislature  which  elected  John  M. 
Palmer  to  the  United  States  Senate  from  Illinois. 
The  election  was  accomplished  only  after  a  memor- 
able deadlock  of  two  months  in  which  the  Democrats 
of  the  general  assembly  stood  so  nobly,  shoulder  to 
shoulder,  that  they  were  called  "The  Immortal  101." 
When  they  were  finally  reenforced  by  the  votes  of 
two  members  elected  as  representatives  of  the  Farm- 
ers' Alliance,  and  elected  their  man,  they  had  a  gold 
medal  struck  to  commemorate  their  own  heroism. 
They  were  not,  perhaps,  exactly  immortal,  but  they 
did  stand  for  their  principles  so  stanchly  that  when 
they  came  to  celebrate  their  victory,  some  of  their 
orators  compared  them  to  those  other  immortals  who 
held  Thermopylae. 

Their  principle  was  the  popular  election  of  United 
States  senators,  and  they  had  a  fine  exemplar  of 
democracy  in  their  candidate.  He  had  been  nomi- 
nated by  a  state  convention,  as  had  Lincoln,  whom 
General  Palmer  had  known  intimately  and  had  sup- 
ported both  for  senator  and  president.  He  was  the 
last  of  those  great  figures  of  Illinois  whom  the  times 
immediately  preceding  the  Civil  War  had  so  abun- 
dantly brought  forth.  He  had  commanded  an  army 
corps,  he  had  been  governor  of  his  state,  and  in 
1872  a  presidential  possibility  in  the  Republican 
party.     But  he  had  turned  to  the  Democrats,  and 

61 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

after  he  became  their  senator,  the  first  Illinois  had 
known  since  Douglas,  he  became  a  presidential  pos- 
sibility in  the  Democratic  party;  that  was  in  1892, 
and  whatever  chances  he  had  he  destroyed  himself 
by  coming  on  from  Washington  and  declaring  for 
Grover  Cleveland. 

Four  years  later  he  was  nominated  for  the  presi- 
dency by  the  conservative  faction  of  his  party.  He 
told  me,  when  I  was  finishing  my  law  studies  under 
him,  that  he  had  never  lost  anything  politically  by 
bolting  any  of  the  several  parties  he  had  been  in,  but 
had  usually  gained  in  self-respect  by  doing  so;  and 
if  to  the  politician  his  whole  career  presented  incon- 
sistencies, to  the  man  of  principle  he  must  seem 
wholly  consistent  and  sincere.  Certain  it  is  that  he 
followed  that  inward  spirit  which  alone  can  guide  a 
man  through  the  perplexities  of  life,  and  so  the  prin- 
ciple with  him  came  ever  before  the  party. 

He  was  a  simple  man  with  simple  tastes,  and  his 
very  simplicity  was  an  element  of  that  dignity  which 
seemed  to  belong  to  other  times  than  ours.  The 
familiar  figure  of  him  along  the  quiet  streets  of 
Springfield  was  pleasing  to  men  and  to  children 
alike;  he  would  go  along  erectly  and  slowly  under 
his  great  broad  hat,  a  striking  figure  with  his  plen- 
tiful white  hair,  his  closely  trimmed  chin  whiskers, 
the  broad,  smoothly  shaven  upper  lip  distinguishing  a 
countenance  that  was  of  a  type  associated  with  the 
earlier  ideals  of  the  republic,  and  the  market  basket 
he  carried  on  his  arm  helped  this  effect.  At  home 
he  was  delightful ;  he  had  a  viol,  and  used  to  play  it, 
if  there  were  not  too  many  about  to  hear  him,  and  if 

62 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

he  were  alone,  sing  a  few  staves  of  old  songs,  like 
"Darling  Nelly  Gray,"  and  "Rosie  Lee,  Courting 
Down  in  Tennessee,"  and  some  of  the  old  tunes  he 
had  learned  in  Kentucky  as  a  boy.  He  liked  poetry, 
if  it  were  not  of  the  introspective  modern  mood,  and 
while  I  have  heard  of  such  extraordinary  characters, 
I  never  believed  the  stories  of  their  endurance,  until 
1  was  able  to  discover  in  him  one  man  who  actually 
did  read  Sir  Walter  Scott's  novels  through  every 
year.  For  the  most  part  he  had  some  member  of  his 
family  read  them  to  him,  and  he  found  in  them  the 
naive  pleasure  of  a  child.  I  used  to  think  I  would 
remember  the  things  he  was  always  saying,  and  the 
stories  he  was  always  telling  about  Lincoln  or  Doug- 
las or  Grant,  but  I  never  could  keep  note-books  and 
the  more  imposing  sayings  have  departed.  Yet 
there  flashes  before  the  memory  with  the  detail  of  a 
cinematograph  that  scene  of  a  winter's  evening  when 
I  entered  the  big  living-room  in  his  home  and  there 
found  him  with  his  wife  before  the  great  open  fire. 
She  was  reading  aloud  to  him  from  "Ivanhoe." 

"Come  in,  Mr.  Brand,"  he  always  addressed  me 
by  prefixing  "Mr."  to  my  Christian  name.  "Come 
in,"  he  called  in  his  hearty  voice.  "We  are  just 
storming  a  castle." 

He  lived  on  to  the  century's  end,  with  a  sort  of 
gusto  in  life  that  never  failed,  I  think,  until  that 
day  when  he  attended  the  funeral  of  the  last  of  his 
old  contemporaries,  General  John  M.  McClernand, 
that  fierce  old  warrior  who  had  quarreled  with  Grant 
and  lived  on  in  Springfield  until  he  could  fight  no 
more  with  anyone.    Senator  Palmer  came  home  from 

63 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

his  funeral  amused  by  the  fact  that  McClernand  had 
been  buried  in  the  full  uniform  of  a  major-general, 
which  he  had  not  worn,  I  suppose,  since  Vicksburg. 
When  some  member  of  Senator  Palmer's  household 
asked  him  if  he  should  like  to  be  buried  in  his  uni- 
form, he  shook  his  head  against  it,  but  added: 
"It  was  all  right  for  Mac ;  it  was  like  him." 
But  the  end  was  in  his  thoughts ;  Oglesby  was 
gone,  and  now  McClernand  as  the  last  of  the  men 
with  whom  he  had  fought  in  the  great  crisis,  and 
he  went,  pretty  soon  after  that,  himself.  He  had 
participated  in  two  great  revolutionary  epochs  of 
his  nation,  going  through  the  one  and  penetrating 
though  not  so  far  into  the  second,  a  long  span  of 
life  and  experience. 

It  was  perhaps  natural  that  he  should  not  have 
divined  the  implications  of  the  second  phase  as 
clearly  as  he  did  those  of  the  first;  and  though  he 
had  helped  to  inaugurate  the  new  movement,  the  lat- 
est urge  toward  democracy  in  this  land,  he  could 
not  go  so  far.  He  was  young  in  '56  and  old  in  '96, 
and  as  we  grow  old  we  grow  conservative,  whether 
we  would  or  not,  and  much,  I  suppose,  in  the  same 
way. 


xn 

Senator  Palmer's  victory  in  1891,  however,  had 
raised  the  hopes  of  the  Illinois  Democracy  for  1892, 
and  it  was  early  in  that  year  that  I  came  to  know 
one  of  the  most  daring  pioneers  of  the  neo-demo- 

64 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

cratic  movement  in  America,  and  the  most  coura- 
geous spirit  of  our  times. 

It  was  on  a  cold  raw  morning  that  I  met  Joseph 
P.  Mahony,  then  a  Democratic  member  of  the  State 
Senate,  who  said: 

"Come  with  me  and  I'll  introduce  you  to  the  next 
governor  of  Illinois." 

It  was  the  time  of  year  when  one  was  meeting 
the  next  governor  of  Illinois  in  most  of  the  hotel 
corridors,  or  men  who  were  trying  to  look  like  po- 
tential governors  of  Illinois,  so  that  such  a  remark 
was  not  to  be  taken  too  literally;  but  I  went,  and 
after  ascending  to  an  upper  floor  of  a  narrow  little 
building  in  Adams  Street,  we  entered  a  suite  of  law 
offices,  and  there  in  a  very  much  crowded,  a  very 
much  littered  and  a  rather  dingy  little  private  room, 
at  an  odd  little  walnut  desk,  sat  John  P.  Altgeld. 

The  figure  was  not  prepossessing;  he  wore  his 
hair  close-clipped  in  ultimate  surrender  to  an  obsti- 
nate cowlick ;  his  beard  was  closely  trimmed,  too,  and 
altogether  the  countenance  was  one  made  for  the 
hands  of  the  cartoonists,  who  in  the  brutal  fury  that 
was  so  soon  to  blaze  upon  him  and  to  continue  to 
blaze  until  it  had  consumed  him  quite,  could  easily 
contort  the  features  to  the  various  purposes  of  an 
ugly  partizanship ;  they  gave  it  a  peculiarly  sinister 
quality,  and  it  is  one  of  the  countless  ironies  of  life 
that  a  face,  sad  with  all  the  utter  woe  of  humanity, 
should  have  become  for  a  season,  and  in  some  minds 
remained  forever,  the  type  and  symbol  of  all  that  is 
most  abhorrent.  There  was  a  peculiar  pallor  in  the 
countenance,  and  the  face  was  such  a  blank  mask  of 

65 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

suffering  and  despair  that,  had  it  not  been  for 
the  high  intelligence  that  shone  from  his  eyes,  it  must 
have  impressed  many  as  altogether  lacking  in  expres- 
sion. Certainly  it  seldom  or  never  expressed  enthu- 
siasm, or  joy,  or  humor,  though  he  had  humor  of  a 
certain  mordant  kind,  as  many  a  political  opponent 
was  to  know. 

He  had  been  a  judge  of  the  Circuit  Court,  and 
was  known  by  his  occasional  addresses,  his  inter- 
views and  articles,  as  a  publicist  of  radical  and 
humanitarian  tendencies.  He  was  known  especially 
to  the  laboring  classes  and  to  the  poor,  who,  by 
that  acute  sympathy  the}r  possess,  divined  in  him 
a  friend,  and  in  the  circles  of  sociological  workers 
and  students,  then  so  small  and  obscure  as  to  make 
their  views  esoteric,  he  was  recognized  as  one  who 
understood  and  sympathized  with  their  tendencies 
and  ideals.  He  was  accounted  in  those  days  a 
wealthy  man, — he  was  just  then  building  one  of  those 
tall  and  ugly  structures  of  steel  called  "sky-scrap- 
ers,"— and  now  that  he  was  spoken  of  for  governor 
this  fact  made  him  seem  "available"  to  the  politi- 
cians. Also  he  had  a  German  name,  another  asset  in 
Illinois  just  then,  when  Germans  all  over  the  state 
felt  themselves  outraged  by  legislation  concerning 
the  "little  red  school-house,"  which  the  Republicans 
had  enacted  when  they  were  in  full  power  in  the 
state. 

But  my  paper  did  not  share  this  enthusiasm  about 
him ;  it  happened  to  be  owned  by  John  R.  Walsh,  and 
between  Walsh  and  Altgeld  there  was  a  feud,  a  feud 
that  cost  Altgeld  his  fortune,  and  lasted  until  the 

66 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

day  that  death  found  him  poor  and  crushed  by  all 
the  tragedy  which  a  closer  observer,  one  with  a 
keener  prescience  of  destiny  than  I,  might  have  read 
in  his  face  from  the  first. 

The  feeling  of  the  paper,  if  one  may  so  personalize 
a  corporation  as  to  endow  it  with  emotion,  was  not 
corrected  by  his  nomination,  and  The  Herald  had 
little  to  say  of  him,  and  what  it  did  say  was  given  out 
in  the  perfunctory  tone  of  a  party  organ.  But  as 
the  summer  wore  on,  and  I  was  able  to  report  to  my 
editors  that  all  the  signs  pointed  to  Altgeld's  elec- 
tion, I  was  permitted  to  write  an  article  in  which  I 
tried  to  describe  his  personality  and  to  give  some 
impression  of  the  able  campaign  he  was  making. 
Horace  Taylor  drew  some  pictures  to  illustrate  it, 
and  I  had  the  satisfaction  of  knowing  that  it  gave 
Altgeld  pleasure,  while  at  the  same  time  to  me  at 
least  it  revealed  for  an  instant  the  humanness  of  the 
man. 

He  sent  for  me — he  was  then  in  offices  in  his  new 
sky-scraper — and  asked  if  I  could  procure  for  him 
Horace  Taylor's  pictures ;  he  hesitated  a  moment, 
and  then,  as  though  it  were  a  weakness  his  Spartan 
nature  was  reluctant  to  reveal,  he  told  me  that  he 
intended  to  have  my  article  republished  in  a  news- 
paper in  Mansfield,  Ohio,  the  town  whence  he  had 
come,  where  he  had  taught  school,  and  where  he 
had  met  the  gracious  lady  who  was  his  wife.  He 
talked  for  a  while  that  afternoon  about  his  youth, 
about  his  poverty  and  his  struggles,  and  then  sud- 
denly lapsed  into  a  silence,  with  his  eyes  fastened 
on  me.    I  wondered  what  he  was  looking  at ;  his  gaze 

67 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

was  disconcerting,  and  it  made  me  self-conscious  and 
uneasy,  till  he  said : 

"Where  could  one  get  a  cravat  like  the  one  you 
have  on?" 

It  was,  I  remember — because  of  the  odd  incident — 
an  English  scarf  of  blue,  quite  new.  I  had  tried  to 
knot  it  as  Ben  Cable  of  the  Democratic  National 
Committee  knotted  his,  and  it  seemed  that  such  a 
little  thing  should  not  be  wanting  to  the  happiness 
of  a  man  who,  by  all  the  outward  standards,  had  so 
much  to  gratify  him  as  Altgeld  had,  and  I  said — 
with  some  embarrassment,  and  some  doubt  as  to  the 
taste  I  was  exhibiting — "Why,  you  may  have  this 
one." 

In  a  moment  his  face  changed,  the  mask  fell,  and 
he  shook  his  head  and  said :  "No,  it  would  not  look 
like  that  on  me." 

After  his  election  it  was  suggested  to  me  that  I 
might  become  his  secretary,  but  I  declined;  in  my 
travels  over  the  state  as  a  political  correspondent  I 
was  always  meeting  aged  men,  seemingly  quite  re- 
spectable and  worthy  and  entirely  well  meaning,  who 
were  introduced  not  so  much  by  name  as  such 
and  such  a  former  governor's  private  secretary; 
though  like  the  moor  which  Browning  crossed,  they 
had 

.  .  .  names  of  their  own, 
And  a  certain  use  in  the  world,  no  doubt. 

But  I  did  take  a  position  in  the  office  of  the  secre- 
tary of  state  that  offered  the   opportunity  I  had 

68 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

been  longing  for;  I  wished  to  finish  my  law  studies, 
and,  deeper  down  than  any  ambition  for  the  bar,  I 
was  nourishing  a  desire  to  write,  or  if  it  does  not 
seem  too  pretentious,  an  ambition  in  literature ;  and 
neither  of  these  aims  could  well  be  accomplished, 
say  from  midnight  on,  after  working  all  day  on  a 
morning  newspaper. 

It  was  a  pleasant  change.  Springfield  was  lovely 
in  the  spring,  which  came  to  it  earlier  than  it  visited 
Chicago,  and  it  was  a  relief  to  escape  the  horrid 
atmosphere  of  a  great  brutal  city  which  as  a  re- 
porter it  had  seemed  my  fate  to  behold  for  the  most 
part  at  night.  There  was  a  sense  of  spaciousness  in 
the  green  avenues  of  the  quiet  town,  and  there  was 
pleasant  society,  and  better  perhaps  than  all  there 
were  two  big  libraries  in  the  Capitol,  the  law  library 
of  the  Supreme  Court  and  the  state  library;  and 
after  the  noisy  legislature  had  adjourned  a  peace 
fell  on  the  great,  cool  stone  pile  that  was  almost 
academic. 

Twice  or  thrice  a  day  Governor  Altgeld  was  to  be 
seen  passing  through  its  vast  corridors,  his  head 
bent  thoughtfully,  rapt  afar  from  the  things  about 
him  in  those  dreams  of  social  amelioration  which  had 
visited  him  so  much  earlier  than  they  came  to  most 
of  his  contemporaries.  He  had  read  much,  and 
during  his  residence  there  the  executive  mansion 
had  the  atmosphere  of  intellectual  culture.  When- 
ever I  went  over  there,  which  I  did  now  and  then  with 
his  secretary  for  luncheon  or  for  an  evening  at  cards, 
our  talk  was  almost  always  of  books. 

We  were  all  reading  George  Meredith  in  those 
69 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

days,  and  Meredith's  greater  contemporary,  Thomas 
Hardy.  "Tess"  had  just  appeared,  and  it  would 
be  about  that  time  that  "Jude"  was  running  as  a 
serial  in  Harper's  Magazine,  though  with  many  eli- 
sions and  under  its  tentative  titles  of  "The  Sim- 
pleton" and  "Hearts  Insurgent" ;  and  we  all  fell  com- 
pletely under  a  fascination  which  has  never  failed  of 
its  weird  and  mysterious  charm,  so  that  I  have  read 
all  his  works,  down  to  his  latest  poems,  over  and 
over  again.  Hardy  is,  perhaps,  the  greatest  intelli- 
gence on  our  planet  now  that  Tolstoy,  from  whom 
he  so  vastly  differed,  is  gone,  and  Altgeld's  whole 
career  might  have  served  him,  had  he  ever  chosen  to 
write  of  those  experiences  that  are  less  implicit  in 
human  nature,  and  more  explicit  in  the  superficial 
aspects  of  public  careers,  as  an  example  of  his  own 
pagan  theory  of  the  contrariety  of  human  affairs 
and  the  spite  of  the  Ironic  Spirits. 

I  was  reading,  too,  the  novels  of  Mr.  William 
Dean  Howells,  as  I  always  have  been  whenever  there 
was  a  moment  to  spare,  and  it  was  with  a  shock  of 
peculiar  delight  and  a  sense  of  corroboration  almost 
authoritative  that  I  learned  that  Mr.  Howells  also 
had  given  voice  to  those  very  same  profound  and 

troubling  convictions  which  Charlie  R had  set 

me  on  the  track  of  two  years  before. 


XIII 

It  was  not  in  any  one  of  Mr.  Howells's  novels  or 
essays,  except  inferentially,  that  I  learned  this,  but 

70 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

among  some  musty  documents  the  worms  were  eating 
up  away  down  in  the  foundations  of  the  State 
House. 

My  work  in  the  office  of  the  secretary  of  state 
involved  the  care  of  the  state's  archives.  The  oldest 
of  these  were  stored  in  a  vault  in  the  cellar  of  the 
huge  pile,  and  the  discovery  had  just  been  made 
that  some  kind  of  insect,  which  the  state  entomolo- 
gist knew  all  about,  was  riddling  those  records  with 
little  holes, — piercing  them  through  and  through. 
In  consequence  a  new  vault  was  prepared,  and  steel 
filing  cases  were  set  up  in  it,  and  the  records  removed 
to  this  safer  sanctuary. 

It  was  a  tedious  and  stupid  task,  until  we  came 
one  day  to  file  what  were  called  the  papers  in  the 
anarchist  case.  Officially  they  related  to  the  appli- 
cation for  the  commutation  of  the  sentences  of  the 
four  men,  Spies,  Engel,  Fischer,  and  Parsons,  who 
had  been  hanged,  and  for  the  pardon  of  the  three 
who  were  then  confined  in  the  penitentiary  at  Joliet, 
Fielden  and  Schwab  for  life,  and  old  Oscar  Neebe 
for  fifteen  years.  Fielden  and  Schwab  had  been  sen- 
tenced to  death  with  the  four  who  had  been  killed, 
but  Governor  Oglesby  had  commuted  their  sentences 
to  imprisonment  for  life;  Neebe's  original  sentence 
had  been  for  the  fifteen  years  he  was  then  serving. 
The  papers  consisted  of  communications  to  the  gov- 
ernor, great  petitions,  and  letters  and  telegrams, 
many  sent  in  mercy,  and  some  in  the  spirit  of  reason, 
asking  for  clemency,  many  in  a  wild  hysteria  of  fear, 
and  the  hideous  hate  that  is  born  of  fear,  begging 
the  governor  to  let  "justice"  take  its  course. 

71 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

There  were  the  names  of  many  prominent  men 
and  women  signed  to  these  communications;  among 
them  was  a  request  signed  by  many  authors  in  Eng- 
land requesting  clemency,  but  there  was  no  appeal 
stronger,  and  no  protest  braver,  than  that  in  the 
letter  which  Mr.  Howells  had  written  to  a  New 
York  newspaper  analyzing  the  case  and  showing  the 
amazing  injustice  of  the  whole  proceeding.  Mr. 
Howells  had  first  gone,  so  he  told  me  in  after  years, 
to  the  aged  poet  Whittier,  whose  gentle  philosophy 
might  have  moved  him  to  a  mood  against  that  public 
wrong,  and  then  to  George  William  Curtis,  but  they 
had  advised  him  to  write  the  protest  himself,  and  he 
had  done  so,  and  he  had  done  it  better  and  more 
bravely  than  either  of  them  could  have  done  out  of 
the  great  conscience  and  the  great  heart  that  have 
always  been  on  the  side  of  the  weak  and  the  op- 
pressed, with  a  mercy  which  when  it  is  practised  by 
mankind  is  always  so  much  nearer  the  right  and  the 
divine  than  our  crude  and  generally  cruel  attempts 
at  justice  can  ever  be. 

But  all  these  prayers  had  fallen  on  official  ears 
that — to  use  a  grotesque  figure — were  so  closely 
pressed  to  the  ground  that  they  could  not  hear ;  and 
there  was  nothing  to  do,  since  they  were  so  many 
and  so  bulky  that  no  latest-improved  and  patented 
steel  filing-case  could  hold  them,  but  to  have  a  big 
box  made  and  lock  them  up  in  that  for  all  time,  for- 
gotten, like  so  many  other  records  of  injustice,  out 
of  the  minds  of  men. 

But  not  entirely;  injustice  was  never  for  long  out 
of  the  mind  of  John  P.  Altgeld,  and  during  all  those 

72 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

first  months  of  his  administration  he  had  been  brood- 
ing over  this  notable  instance  of  injustice,  and  he 
had  come  to  his  decision.  He  knew  the  cost  to  him; 
he  had  just  come  to  the  governorship  of  his  state, 
and  to  the  leadership  of  his  party,  after  its  thirty 
years  of  defeat,  and  he  realized  what  powerful  in- 
terests would  be  frightened  and  offended  if  he  were 
to  turn  three  forgotten  men  out  of  prison ;  he  under- 
stood how  partizanship  would  turn  the  action  to  its 
advantage. 

It  mattered  not  that  most  of  the  thoughtful  men 
in  Illinois  would  tell  you  that  the  "anarchists"  had 
been  improperly  convicted,  that  they  were  not  only 
entirely  innocent  of  the  murder  of  which  they  had 
been  accused,  but  were  not  even  anarchists ;  it  was 
simply  that  the  mob  had  convicted  them  in  one  of 
the  strangest  frenzies  of  fear  that  ever  distracted  a 
whole  community,  a  case  which  all  the  psychologists 
of  all  the  universities  in  the  world  might  have  tried, 
without  getting  at  the  truth  of  it — much  less  a  jury 
in  a  criminal  court. 

And  so,  one  morning  in  June,  very  early,  I  was 
called  to  the  governor's  office,  and  told  to  make  out 
pardons  for  Fielden,  Neebe,  and  Schwab.  "And  do 
it  yourself,"  said  the  governor's  secretary,  "and 
don't  say  anything  about  it  to  anybody." 

I  cannot  tell  in  what  surprise,  in  what  a  haze,  or 
with  what  emotions  I  went  about  that  task.  I  got 
the  blanks  and  the  records,  and,  before  the  execu- 
tive clerk,  whose  work  it  was,  had  come  down,  I 
made  out  those  three  pardons,  in  the  largest,  round- 
est hand  I  could  command,  impressed  them  with  the 

73 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

Great  Seal  of  State,  had  the  secretary  of  state  sign 
them,  and  took  them  over  to  the  governor's  office. 
I  was  admitted  to  his  private  room,  and  there  he 
sat,  at  his  great  flat  desk.  The  only  other  person  in 
the  room  was  Dreier,  a  Chicago  banker,  who  had 
never  wearied,  it  seems,  in  his  efforts  to  have 
those  men  pardoned.  He  was  standing,  and  was 
very  nervous ;  the  moment  evidently  meant  much  to 
him.  The  Governor  took  the  big  sheets  of  imitation 
parchment,  glanced  over  them,  signed  his  name  to 
each,  laid  down  the  pen,  and  handed  the  papers 
across  the  table  to  Dreier.  The  banker  took  them, 
and  began  to  say  something.  But  he  only  got  as 
far  as 

"Governor,  I  hardly" — when  he  broke  down  and 
wept.  Altgeld  made  an  impatient  gesture;  he  was 
gazing  out  of  the  window  in  silence,  on  the  elm-trees 
in  the  yard.  He  took  out  his  watch,  told  Dreier  he 
would  miss  his  train — Dreier  was  to  take  the  Alton 
to  Joliet,  deliver  the  pardons  to  the  men  in  person, 
and  go  on  into  Chicago  with  them  that  night — and 
Dreier  nervously  rolled  up  the  pardons,  took  up  a 
little  valise,  shook  hands,  and  was  gone. 

On  the  table  was  a  high  pile  of  proofs  of  the  docu- 
ment in  which  Governor  Altgeld  gave  the  reasons  for 
his  action.  It  was  an  able  paper;  one  might  well 
rank  it  among  state  papers,  and  I  suppose  no  one 
now,  in  these  days,  when  so  many  of  Altgeld's  demo- 
cratic theories  are  popular,  would  deny  that  his 
grounds  were  just  and  reasonable,  or  that  he  had 
done  what  he  could  to  right  a  great  wrong;  though 
he  would  regret  that  so  great  a  soul  should  have 

74 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

permitted  itself  to  mar  the  document  by  expressions 
of  hatred  of  the  judge  who  tried  the  case.  But  per- 
haps it  is  not  so  easy  to  be  calm  and  impersonal  in 
the  midst  of  the  moving  event,  as  it  is  given  to  others 
to  be  long  afterward. 

But  whatever  feelings  he  may  have  had,  he  was 
calm  and  serene  ever  after.  I  saw  him  as  I  was 
walking  down  to  the  Capitol  the  next  morning.  It 
was  another  of  those  June  days  which  now  and  then 
are  so  perfect  on  the  prairies.  The  Governor  was 
riding  his  horse — he  was  a  gallant  horseman — and 
he  bowed  and  smiled  that  faint,  wan  smile  of  his,  and 
drew  up  to  the  curb  a  moment.  There  was,  of 
course,  but  one  subject  then,  and  I  said: 

"Well,  the  storm  will  break  now." 

"Oh,  yes,"  he  replied,  with  a  not  wholly  con- 
vincing air  of  throwing  off  a  care,  "I  was  prepared 
for  that.     It  was  merely  doing  right." 

I  said  something  to  him  then  to  express  my  satis- 
faction in  the  great  deed  that  was  to  be  so  wilfully, 
recklessly,  and  cruelly  misunderstood.  I  did  not  say 
all  I  might  have  said,  for  I  felt  that  my  opinions 
could  mean  so  little  to  him.  I  have  wished  since  that 
I  had  said  more, — said  something,  if  that  might  have 
been  my  good  fortune,  that  could  perhaps  have 
made  a  great  burden  a  little  easier  for  that  brave 
and  tortured  soul.  But  he  rode  away  with  that  wan, 
persistent  smile.  And  the  storm  did  break,  and  the 
abuse  it  rained  upon  him  broke  his  heart;  but  I 
never  again  heard  him  mention  the  anarchist  case. 


75 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 


XIV 

The  newspapers  were  so  extravagant  in  their 
abuse  of  Governor  Altgeld  for  his  pardon  of  the 
anarchists  that  one  not  knowing  the  facts  might  have 
received  the  impression  that  the  Governor  had  al- 
ready pardoned  most  of  the  prisoners  in  the  peni- 
tentiary, and  would  presently  pardon  those  that 
remained,  provided  the  crimes  they  had  commit- 
ted, or  were  said  to  have  committed,  had  been 
heinous  enough.  The  fact  was  that  he  issued  no 
more  pardons,  proportionately  at  least,  than  the 
governors  who  preceded  him,  since  notwithstand- 
ing the  incessant  grinding  of  society's  machin- 
ery of  vengeance  the  populations  of  prisons  grow 
with  the  populations  outside  of  them. 

But  partizanship  was  intense  in  those  days ;  and 
the  fact  that  Governor  Altgeld  was  responsible  for 
such  a  hegira  from  the  Capitol  at  Springfield  as 
Colonel  McKenzie  had  longed  to  behold  in  the  Capitol 
at  Frankfort  exacerbated  the  bitter  feeling.  The 
sentiment  thus  created,  however,  did  increase  the 
hopes  of  convicts,  and  the  Governor  was  continually 
importuned  by  their  friends — those  of  them  that  had 
friends,  which  was  apt  to  be  a  pitifully  small  per- 
centage of  the  whole  number — to  give  them  back 
their  liberty.  A  few  weeks  after  the  pardons  had 
been  issued  to  the  anarchists,  George  Brennan  of 
Braidwood,  then  a  clerk  in  the  State  House,  told  me 
a  moving  story  of  a  young  man  of  his  acquaintance, 
who  was  then  confined  in  the  penitentiary  at  Joliet. 

76 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

The  young  man  was  dying  of  tuberculosis,  and  his 
mother,  having  no  other  hope  than  that  he  might  be 
released  to  die  at  home,  had  made  her  appeal  to 
Brennan,  and  he  had  seen  to  the  filing  of  an  applica- 
tion in  due  form,  and  now  he  asked  me  if  I  would  not 
call  the  Governor's  attention  to  it.  I  got  out  the 
great  blue  envelope  containing  the  thin  papers  in  the 
case — they  were  as  few  as  the  young  man's  friends — 
and  took  them  over  to  the  Governor,  but  no  sooner 
had  I  laid  them  on  his  desk  and  made  the  first  hesi- 
tating and  tentative  approach  to  the  subject,  than  I 
divined  the  moment  to  be  wholly  inauspicious.  The 
Governor  did  not  even  look  at  the  papers,  he  did  not 
even  touch  the  big  blue  linen  envelope,  but  shook 
his  head  and  said : 

"No,  no,  I  will  not  pardon  any  more.  The  people 
are  opposed  to  it ;  they  do  not  believe  in  mercy ;  they 
love  revenge;  they  want  the  prisoners  punished  to 
the  bitterest  extremity." 

I  did  not  then  know  how  right  he  was  in  his  cynical 
generalization,  though  I  did  know  that  his  decision 
was  so  far  from  his  own  heart  that  it  was  no  decision 
at  all,  but  merely  the  natural  human  reaction  against 
all  the  venom  that  had  been  voided  upon  him,  and  I 
went  away  then,  and  told  Brennan  that  we  must  wait 
until  the  Governor  was  in  another  mood. 

Three  or  four  days  afterward  I  met  the  Governor 
one  morning  as  he  was  passing  through  the  rotunda 
of  the  State  House,  his  head  bent  in  habitual  ab- 
straction, and  seeing  me  in  what  seemed  always  some 
subconscious  way  he  stopped  and  said : 

"Oh,  by  the  way:  that  pardon  case  you  spoke  of 
77 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

the  other  morning — I  was  somewhat  hasty  I  fear, 
and  out  of  humor.  If  you'll  get  the  papers  I'll  see 
what  can  be  done." 

I  knew  of  course  what  could  be  done,  and  knew 
then  that  it  would  be  done,  and  I  made  haste  to  get 
the  papers,  which  had  been  kept  on  my  desk  await- 
ing that  propitious  season  which  I  had  the  faith  to 
feel  would  come  sooner  or  later,  though  I  had  not 
expected  it  to  come  quite  so  soon  as  that.  I  already 
anticipated  the  gladness  that  would  light  up  Bren- 
nan's  good  Irish  face  when  I  handed  him  the  pardon 
for  his  friend,  and  I  could  dramatize  the  scene  in 
that  miner's  cottage  in  Braidwood  when  the  par- 
doned boy  flew  to  his  mother's  arms.  I  intended  to 
say  nothing  then  to  Brennan,  however,  but  to  wait 
until  the  pardon,  signed  and  sealed,  could  be  deliv- 
ered into  his  hands,  but  as  I  was  going  across  the 
hall  to  the  Governor's  chambers  I  encountered  Bren- 
nan, and  then  of  course  could  not  hold  back  the  good 
news.  And  so  I  told  him,  looking  into  his  blue  eyes 
to  behold  the  first  ripple  of  the  smile  I  expected  to 
see  spread  over  his  face;  but  there  was  no  smile. 
He  regarded  me  quite  soberly,  shook  his  head,  and 
said: 

"It's  too  late  now." 

And  he  drew  from  his  pocket  a  telegram,  and, 
without  any  need  to  read  it,  said: 

"He  died  last  night." 

I  took  the  papers  back  and  had  them  filed  away 
among  those  cases  that  had  been  finally  disposed  of, 
though  that  formality  could  not  dispose  of  the  case 
for  me.     The  Governor  was  waiting  for  the  papers, 

78 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

and  at  last  when  the  morning  had  almost  worn  away 
I  went  over  to  his  chambers  to  add  another  fardel 
to  that  heavy  load  which  I  had  thought  it  was  to  be 
my  lot  that  day  to  see  lightened  in  the  doing  of  an 
act  of  grace  and  pity.  I  told  him  as  he  sat  alone 
at  his  desk,  and  the  shade  of  sorrow  deepened  a 
moment  on  his  pale  face;  but  he  said  nothing,  and 
I  was  glad  to  go. 

The  poor  little  tragedy  had  its  impressions  for 
me,  and  it  was  not  long  until  I  thought  I  saw  in  it 
the  motive  of  a  story,  which  at  once  I  began  to  write. 
The  theme  was  the  embarrassment  which  a  gov- 
ernor's conscience  created  for  him  because  during  a 
critical  campaign  he  knew  it  to  be  his  duty  to  pardon 
a  notorious  convict, — and  I  invented  the  situations 
and  expedients  to  bear  the  tale  along  to  that  thrill- 
ing climax  in  which  the  governor  was  delivered  out 
of  his  difficulty  by  the  most  opportune  death  of  the 
convict,  whom  a  higher  hand  could  dramatically  be 
said  to  have  pardoned.  I  worked  very  hard  on  the 
story,  and  thought  it  pretty  fine,  and  I  sent  it  away 
at  last  to  an  eastern  magazine.  And  then  I  waited, 
and  at  length  a  letter  came  saying  that  the  story 
was  well  enough  thought  of  in  that  editorial  room 
to  hold  it  until  the  editor-in-chief  should  return 
from  Europe  and  hand  down  a  final  decision.  I 
waited  for  weeks,  and  then  one  morning  there  on  my 
desk  was  an  envelope,  ominous  in  its  bigness ;  it  was 
one  of  those  letters  you  do  not  have  to  open  in  order 
to  read  them,  because  you  know  what  they  say;  I 
knew  my  manuscript  had  come  back.  But  when  I 
opened  the  package,  instead  of  the  familiar  slip  of 

79 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

rejection,  there  was  a  letter;  the  editor  liked  the 
story,  saw  much  in  it,  he  said,  but  felt — and  quite 
rightly  I  am  sure — that  its  ending,  with  the  convict 
dying  in  the  very  nick  of  time  to  save  the  governor 
from  his  embarrassment,  was  an  evasion  of  the  whole 
moral  issue ;  besides,  the  conclusion  was  too  melodra- 
matic,— that  was  the  word  he  used, — and  would  I 
change  it? 

The  day  after  all  was  bright  and  cheerful;  I 
remember  it  well,  the  sun  lying  on  the  State  House 
lawns,  their  green  dotted  with  the  gold  of  dande- 
lions, and  the  trees  twisting  their  leaves  almost  rap- 
turously in  a  sparkling  air  we  did  not  often  breathe 
on  those  humid  prairies.  And — though  this  has 
nothing  whatever  to  do  with  the  case,  and  enters  it 
only  as  one  of  those  incidents  that  linger  in  the 
memory — William  Jennings  Bryan  was  there  that 
day,  calling  on  the  Governor  and  the  Secretary  of 
State.  He  was  then  a  young  congressman  from 
Nebraska,  and  he  made  a  speech;  but  I  was  inter- 
ested in  the  story  far  more  than  in  politics  or  any 
speech  about  it,  even  the  brilliant  speech  of  a  man 
who  so  soon,  and  with  such  remarkable  elan,  was  to 
charge  across  the  country  on  the  hosts  of  privilege. 

And  I  changed  the  story;  I  made  that  poor  har- 
ried governor  drain  his  bitter  cup  of  duty  to  the  lees, 
and  gave  the  story  an  ending  so  remorselessly  logi- 
cal, so  true  to  the  facts  and  fates  of  human  experi- 
ence, that  it  might  have  been  as  depressing  as  one  of 
Hardy's  "Little  Ironies" — could  it  have  resembled 
them  in  any  other  way,  which  of  course  it  could  not, 
unless  it  were  in  that  imitation  with  which  the  last 

80 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

author  I  had  been  reading  was  pretty  sure  though 
all  unconsciously  to  be  flattered.  I  changed  the 
story,  and  sent  the  MS.  back  to  the  waiting  editor ; 
and  it  was  returned  as  the  string  snaps  back  to  the 
bow,  with  a  letter  that  showed  plainly  that  his  in- 
terest in  the  tale  had  all  evaporated.  He  had  no  re- 
grets, it  appeared,  save  one  perhaps,  since  he  con- 
cluded his  letter  by  saying: 

"Besides,  you  have  destroyed  the  fine  dramatic 
ending  which  the  story  possessed  in  its  first  draft." 

The  experience  uprooted  another  of  society's  oak- 
trees  for  me,  and  it  has  continued  to  lie  there,  with 
the  roots  of  its  infallibility  withering  whitely  in  the 
air,  though  humanity  still  somehow  continues  to  ar- 
range itself  about  the  institution  as  best  it  can.  This 
process  of  uprooting,  I  suppose,  goes  on  in  life  to  the 
very  end;  but  it  is  wholesome  after  all,  since  life 
grows  somehow  easier  after  one  has  learned  that 
human  beings  are  all  pretty  human  and  pretty  much 
alike  in  their  humanness,  and  the  great  service  of 
literature  to  mankind  has  been,  and  more  and  more 
will  be,  I  hope,  to  teach  human  beings  this  salutary 
and  consoling  lesson. 

But,  in  no  way  despairing,  I  kept  the  manuscript 
by  me,  and  when  I  was  not  trying  to  write  other 
stories  I  was  retouching  it,  until  in  the  end  its  fate 
was  almost  that  of  the  portrait  which  the  artist  in 
one  of  Balzac's  stories  kept  on  trying  to  improve 
until  it  was  but  a  meaningless  scumble  of  gray,  with 
no  likeness  to  anything  in  this  universe.  Its  fate 
was  not  quite  that  bad,  however,  since  it  made  for  me 
a  friend. 

81 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 


XV 


The  incident,  like  that  on  which  the  story  itself 
was  founded,  occurred  in  the  course  of  another  effort 
to  induce  the  Governor  to  save  a  poor  wretch  from 
the  gallows.  The  autumn  preceding,  just  when  the 
World's  Fair  at  Chicago  was  at  its  apogee,  a  half- 
crazed  boy  had  assassinated  Carter  Harrison,  the  old 
mayor  of  that  city,  and  had  been  promptly  tried  and 
condemned  to  death.  The  time  for  the  execution  of 
the  sentence  drew  on,  and  two  or  three  days  before 
the  black  event  I  had  a  telegram  from  Peter  Dunne 
and  other  newspaper  friends  in  Chicago  asking  me  to 
urge  the  governor,  or  the  acting  governor  as  it 
happened  at  that  time  to  be,  to  commute  the  sen- 
tence to  one  of  imprisonment  for  life.  The  boy,  so 
the  telegrams  said,  was  clearly  insane,  and  had  been 
at  the  time  of  his  crazy  and  desperate  deed ;  his  case 
had  not  been  presented  with  the  skill  that  might  have 
saved  him,  or  at  least  might  have  saved  another  in 
such  a  plight ;  there  had  been  the  customary  hue  and 
cry,  the  most  cherished  process  of  the  English  law, 
"and,"  Dunne  concluded,  "do  get  Joe  Gill  to  let 
him  off." 

Joe  Gill  was  Joseph  B.  Gill,  the  young  Lieutenant- 
Governor  of  the  state,  and  because  Governor  Alt- 
geld  was  just  then  out  of  the  state  he  was  on  the 
bridge  as  acting  governor.  Gill  had  been  one  of  the 
Immortal  101,  and  as  a  representative  had  made  a 
record  in  support  of  certain  humane  measures  in 
behalf  of  the  miners  of  the  state.     The  newspaper 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

correspondents  had  had  pleasure  in  celebrating  him 
and  his  work  in  their  despatches,  and  because  of  his 
popularity  among  the  miners,  to  say  nothing  of  his 
popularity  among  the  newspaper  men,  he  had  been 
nominated  for  lieutenant-governor  on  the  ticket 
with  Altgeld.  There  was  in  our  relations  a  camara- 
derie which  put  any  thought  of  presumption  out  of 
the  question;  besides,  I  was  always  so  much  opposed 
to  the  killing  of  human  beings,  especially  to  that 
peculiarly  horrible  form  of  killing  which  the  state 
deliberately  and  in  cold  blood  commits  under  the 
euphemism  of  "capital  punishment,"  that  I  was  al- 
ways ready  to  ask  any  governor  to  commute  a  sen- 
tence of  death  that  had  been  pronounced  against 
anybody;  so  that  it  seemed  a  simple  matter  to 
ask  Joe  Gill,  himself  the  heart  of  kindness,  to 
save  the  life  of  this  boy  whose  soul  had  wandered 
so  desperately  astray  in  the  clouds  which  darkened 
it. 

Early  the  next  mornings — the  telegrams  had  come 
at  night — I  went  over  to  the  governor's  office,  and 
the  governor's  private  secretary  told  me  that  Lieu- 
tenant-Governor Gill  had  not  yet  appeared,  and  as  a 
good  secretary,  anxious  to  protect  his  chief,  he 
asked : 

"What  do  you  want  to  see  him  about?" 

"This  Prendergast  they're  going  to  hang  in  Chi- 
cago next  Friday." 

At  this  a  man  sitting  in  the  room  near  the  sec- 
retary's desk  looked  up  with  a  sudden  access  of  in- 
tense interest;  and,  starting  from  his  chair  and 
transfixing  me  with  a  sharp  glance,  he  asked: 

83 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

"What  interest  have  you  in  the  Prendergast 
case?" 

"None,"  I  said,  "except  that  I  don't  want  to 
have  him,  or  anybody,  hanged." 

On  the  man's  face,  tired,  with  the  expression  of 
world-weariness  life  gives  to  the  countenance  be- 
hind which  there  has  been  too  much  serious  con- 
templation of  life,  a  face  that  seemed  prematurely 
wrinkled,  there  suddenly  appeared  a  smile  as  win- 
ning as  a  woman's,  and  he  said  in  a  voice  that  had 
the  timbre  of  human  sympathy  and  the  humor  of 
a  peculiar  drawl: 

"Well,  you're  all  right,  then." 

It  thereupon  occurred  to  the  governor's  secre- 
tary to  introduce  us,  and  so  I  made  the  acquaint- 
ance of  Clarence  Darrow.  He  had  taken  it  upon 
himself  to  neglect  his  duties  as  the  attorney  of 
some  of  the  railroads  and  other  large  corporations 
in  Chicago  long  enough  to  come  down  to  Springfield 
on  his  own  initiative  and  responsibility  to  plead 
with  the  Governor  for  this  lad's  life  (he  was  always 
going  on  some  such  Quixotic  errand  of  mercy  for 
the  poor  and  the  friendless),  and  we  retired  to  the 
governor's  ante-chamber  to  await  the  coming  of 
Gill.  We  talked  for  a  while  about  the  Prendergast 
case,  which  might  have  had  more  sympathetic  con- 
sideration had  it  not  persisted  as  the  Carter  Har- 
rison case  in  the  mind  of  that  public,  which  when 
its  latent  spirit  of  vengeance  is  aroused  can  so 
easily  become  the  mob,  but  it  was  not  long  until  I 
discovered  that  Darrow  had  read  books  other  than 
those  of  the  law,  and  for  an  hour  we  talked  of  Tol- 

84 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

stoy  and  the  other  great  Russians,  and  of  Thomas 
Hardy  and  of  Mr.  Howells,  to  enumerate  no  more 
of  the  long  catalogue  of  those  realists  whom  we 
liked  in  common,  and  when  I  discovered  that  he 
actually  knew  Mr.  Howells,  knew  him  personally,  as 
the  saying  is,  I  could  feel  that  poor  Prendergast, 
though  I  had  never  seen  him  in  my  life,  or  scarcely 
ever  thought  of  him  until  the  night  before,  had  done 
me  one  service  at  least,  and  it  made  me  all  the  more 
anxious  to  save  him. 

When  Joe  Gill's  tall  Egyptian  form  came  swing- 
ing into  the  room  our  talk  of  books  was  interrupted 
long  enough  to  arrange  for  a  hearing  that  after- 
noon, and  then  we  resumed  our  talk,  and  it  endured 
through  luncheon  and  after,  and  I  left  him  only 
long,  enough  to  have  a  conversation  with  Gill  and 
to  ask  him  as  a  sort  of  personal  favor  to  an  old 
friend  to  spare  the  boy's  life. 

At  two  o'clock  the  hearing  was  called.  The  re- 
porters and  the  governor's  secretary  and  George 
Brennan  and  I  made  the  audience,  and  Gill  sat  up 
erectly  in  the  governor's  chair  to  hear  the  appeal. 
Darrow  asked  me  the  proper  address  for  a  gover- 
nor, and  I  said  since  this  was  the  lieutenant-gov- 
ernor I  thought  "Your  Excellency"  would  be  pro- 
pitiative,  and  Darrow  made  one  of  those  eloquent 
appeals  for  mercy  of  which  he  is  the  complete  mas- 
ter. It  moved  us  all,  but  the  Lieutenant-Governor 
gathered  himself  together  and  refused  it,  and  Dar- 
row went  back  to  Chicago  to  unfold  those  legal 
technicalities  which  make  our  law  so  superior  to 
other  forms  in  that  they  can  stay  the  hand  of  its 

85 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

vengeance.  He  did  not  succeed  in  the  end,  and  the 
boy  was  hanged,  and  murder  has  gone  on  in  Chicago 
since,  I  understand,  the  same  as  before.  But  Dar- 
row  could  not  leave  Springfield  until  midnight  of 
that  day,  and  we  talked  about  books  all  the  evening, 
and  when  he  boarded  his  train  he  had  in  his  valise 
the  MS.  of  my  story  about  another  governor  and 
another  pardon,  concerning  which  he  was  charged 
to  answer  a  certain  question  to  which  all  my  doubts 
and  perplexities  could  be  reduced,  namely:  "Is  it 
worth  while,  and  if  not,  is  there  any  use  in  going  on 
and  trying  to  write  one  that  is?" 

I  had  to  wait  almost  as  long  for  his  decision  as 
though  he  had  been  an  editor  himself,  but  when  I 
called  at  his  office  in  Chicago  one  morning  in  the 
autumn  to  get  the  MS.,  and  he  told  me  that  his  an- 
swer to  my  question  was  "yes,"  and  that  he  would, 
if  I  agreed,  send  the  story  to  Mr.  Howells,  I  was  as 
happy  as  though  he  had  been  an  editor  and  had  ac- 
cepted it  for  publication.  I  could  not  agree  to  its 
being  sent  on  to  weary  Mr.  Howells,  but  took  it 
back  with  me  to  Springfield,  in  hope,  if  not  in  con- 
fidence. 

XVI 

However,  it  has  seemed  to  be  my  fate,  or  my 
weakness,  which  we  too  often  confuse  with  fate,  to 
vacillate  between  an  interest  in  letters  and  an  in- 
terest in  politics,  and  after  that  year,  whose  days 
and  nights  were  almost  wholly  given  to  studying 
law,  I  was  admitted  to  the  bar,  and  thereupon  felt 

86 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

qualified  to  go  out  on  the  stump  in  the  campaign  that 
autumn  and  speak  in  behalf  of  the  Democratic  ticket. 
It  was  fun  to  drive  out  over  Sangamon  County  in 
those  soft  autumn  evenings,  over  the  soft  roads, — 
though  if  it  rained  they  became  too  soft, — and  to 
speak  in  schoolhouses  to  the  little  audiences  of  farm- 
ers, or  of  miners,  on  the  iniquities  of  the  tariff.  If  we 
had  been  a  little  more  devoted  to  principle,  perhaps, 
than  we  were  to  party,  we  might  better  have  spoken 
of  the  iniquities  of  that  Democratic  minority  in 
the  Senate  which  had  just  completed  its  betrayal 
of  us  all  and  helped  to  perpetrate  those  iniquities, 
but  when  you  belong  to  a  party  you  are  presumed 
to  adjust  yourself  to  what  your  representatives  do, 
and  to  make  the  best  of  what  generally  is  a  pretty 
bad  bargain.  The  bargain  of  those  senators  had 
been  particularly  bad,  and  so,  instead  of  speaking 
in  the  tones  of  righteous  indignation,  we  had  to 
adopt  the  milder  accents  of  apology  and  explana- 
tion, and  it  was  difficult  to  explain  to  some  of  those 
audiences.  There  was  more  or  less  heckling,  and 
now  and  then  impromptu  little  debates,  and  some- 
times when  the  meeting  was  done,  and  we  started  on 
the  long  ride  back  to  town,  we  would  find  that  the 
nuts  had  been  removed  from  the  axles  of  our  car- 
riage-wheels. Perhaps  that  argument  was  as  good 
as  any  we  had  made,  and  it  could  not  matter  much 
anyway,  since  partizan  speeches  never  convince  any- 
body, and  if  they  could,  if  they  could  do  anything 
but  deepen  and  intensify  prejudice,  whole  batteries 
of  the  world's  best  orators  in  that  year  could  not 
have  overcome  the  vicious  effects  of  that  high  be- 

87 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

trayal,  even  though  they  had  been  led  to  the  charge 
by  Phocion  and  Demosthenes. 

I  suppose  no  greater  moral  wrong  was  ever  com- 
mitted in  America.  It  had  been  bad  enough  that 
a  policy  of  favoritism  and  advantage  which  ap- 
pealed to  so  many  because  of  the  good  luck  of  its 
reassuring  name,  had  endured  so  long,  as  a  sort  of 
necessity  in  the  development  of  a  new  continent;  it 
had  been  bad  enough  that  labor  had  first  been  lied  to 
and  then  subjugated  by  the  lie,  that  women  had 
been  driven  into  mills,  and  children  had  been  fed  to 
the  Moloch  of  the  machines,  and  that  on  these  sac- 
rifices there  had  been  reared  in  America  an  insolent 
plutocracy  with  the  ideals  of  a  gambler  and  the 
manners  of  a  wine-agent.  But  when  the  working 
men  had  learned  at  last  that  the  system  did  not 
"protect"  them,  and  when  thousands  of  young  men 
in  the  land,  filled  with  the  idealism  of  youth,  had 
recognized  the  lie  and  the  hypocrisy,  and  hated  them 
with  a  fine  moral  abhorrence,  and  had  turned  to  the 
Democratic  party  and  trusted  it  to  redeem  its  prom- 
ise to  reform  this  evil,  and  had  put  it  in  power  in 
the  nation,  only  to  have  its  leaders  in  the  Senate 
betray  them  with  the  brutal  cynicism  such  a  cause 
as  theirs  demands,  then  there  was  committed  a  deed 
little  short  of  dastardly.  If  that  seems  too  strong  a 
word,  the  deed  was  surely  contemptible,  and  base 
enough  to  fill  anyone  with  despair  of  the  party  and 
of  the  party  system  as  it  had  been  developed  in 
America,  though  it  has  been  understood  by  only  two 
men  so  far  as  I  know — M.  Ostrogorski  and  Golden 
Rule  Jones.     It  was  enough  to  disgust  anyone  with 

88 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

politics  altogether,  and  to  forswear  them  and 
parties,  too,  although  I  never  quite  understood  the 
philosophy  of  the  attitude  until,  a  few  years  later, 
Golden  Rule  Jones  made  it  clear.  He  made  many 
things  clear,  for  he  dropped  the  plummet  of  his  orig- 
inal mind  down,  down,  down,  more  profoundly  into 
fundamental  life  than  anyone  I  can  think  of. 

To  me,  in  those  days,  the  tariff  question  had 
seemed  entirely  fundamental.  I  used  to  think  that 
if  we  could  but  have  civil-service  reform,  and  tariff 
for  revenue  only,  the  world  would  go  very  well.  The 
tariff  question  is  not  considered  fundamental  in 
these  days,  of  course,  so  fast  and  so  far  past  the 
Mugwumps  has  the  world  run,  though  everybody  re- 
alizes its  evil,  and  knows,  or  should  know,  that  the 
notion  of  privilege  on  which  tariffs  are  founded  is 
quite  fundamentally  wrong,  and  every  political  party 
promises  to  reduce  its  rates,  or  revise  them,  or  at 
least  to  take  some  measures  against  the  lie. 

The  Democratic  party,  to  be  sure,  redeemed  itself 
later  under  the  splendid  leadership  of  President  Wil- 
son, but  at  that  time,  while  we  recognized  the  evil  of 
the  theory,  we  seemed  to  have  sunk  into  a  sordid 
acquiescence  in  the  fact;  everybody  thought  the 
tariff  wrong,  but  nobody  wished  to  have  it  done  away 
with  so  long  as  there  was  a  chance,  to  speak  in  mod- 
ern American,  for  him  to  get  in  on  the  graft.  The 
word  "graft"  was  unknown  in  those  days,  by  all  save 
those  thieves  in  whose  argot  it  was  found  and  de- 
voted to  its  present  general  use  in  the  vocabulary. 
I  suppose  it  is  in  the  dictionary  by  this  time.  In 
any  event,  it  is  not  strange  that  the  word  should 

89 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

have  become  so  current,  since  for  a  while  we  made 
a  national  institution  of  the  very  thing  it  connotes. 

There  was,  however,  then  and  always,  the  labor 
question,  and  we  were  beginning  to  discover  that 
that  is  fundamental,  perhaps  the  one  great  funda- 
mental,— aside  from  the  complication  of  evil  and 
good  that  is  inherent  and  implicit  in  humanity  it- 
self,— since  the  burning  question  is  and  always  will 
be  how  the  work  of  the  world  is  to  be  got  done,  and, 
what  is  a  much  more  embarrassing  problem,  who  is 
to  do  it.  Many  of  the  men  who  had  been  doing  that 
work,  or  the  heaviest  of  it,  were  striking  in  Illinois 
in  those  years. 

The  shots  the  Pinkertons  had  fired  at  Homestead 
echoed  in  the  state;  Senator  Palmer  had  made  a 
great  speech  about  it  in  the  Senate;  and  perhaps 
the  tariff  had  something  to  do  with  that,  since  tariffs 
on  steel  have  not  been  unknown.  But  there  were 
shots  fired  nearer  home,  first  in  the  strike  among 
the  men  who  were  digging  the  drainage  canal,  then 
among  the  miners  in  the  soft  coal  fields  of  the  state, 
then  the  strike  in  the  model  town  of  Pullman,  and 
the  great  railroad  strike  that  grew  out  of  it. 

They  called  it  the  Debs  Rebellion,  and  for  a  while 
it  assumed  some  of  the  proportions  of  a  rebellion, 
or  at  least  it  frightened  many  people  in  Illinois  as 
much  as  a  rebellion  might  have  done.  We  were  in 
the  midst  of  all  its  alarms  during  that  whole  spring 
and  summer,  and  down  in  the  adjutant-general's 
office  at  the  State  House  there  was  the  stir  almost 
of  war  itself,  with  troops  being  ordered  here  and 
there  about   the   state,  and   the  Governor  harried 

90 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

and  worried  by  a  situation  that  presented  to  him 
the  abhorrent  necessity  of  using  armed  force.  I  was 
reading  over  the  other  day  the  report  made  to  the 
War  Department  by  my  friend  Major  Jewett  Baker, 
then  a  lieutenant  in  the  Twelfth  U.  S.  Infantry, 
detailed  with  the  National  Guard  of  Illinois ;  and 
in  his  clear  and  excellent  account  of  all  those  con- 
fused events  the  scenes  of  those  times  came  back: 
the  long  lines  of  idle  freight  cars,  charred  by  in- 
cendiary flames ;  the  little  groups  of  men  standing 
about  wearing  the  white  ribbons  of  the  strike  sym- 
pathizers, and  the  colonel  of  the  regular  army,  in 
his  cups  at  his  club,  who  wished  he  might  order  a 
whole  regiment  to  shoot  them,  "each  man  to  take 
aim  at  a  dirty  white  ribbon";  the  regulars  en- 
camped on  the  lake  front,  their  sentinels  pacing 
their  posts  at  the  quickstep  in  the  rain;  and  then 
that  morning  conference  in  the  mayor's  office  in  Chi- 
cago, at  which  I  was  permitted  to  look  on — what  an 
interesting  life  it  is  to  look  on  at! — when  there  ap- 
peared Eugene  V.  Debs,  tall,  lithe,  nervous,  leader  of 
the  strikers,  his  hair,  what  there  was  of  it,  sandy,  but 
his  head  mostly  bald,  his  eyes  flashing,  his  mouth 
ready  to  smile,  soon  to  go  to  Woodstock  Jail,  to 
emerge  a  Socialist,  and  become  the  leader  of  that 
party. 

Major  Baker's  report  shows,  indirectly  and  by  in- 
ference, that  much  of  the  criticism  which  the  Gov- 
ernor endured  was  not  justified,  since  he  turned  out 
all  his  troops  as  fast  as  local  authorities  asked  for 
them.  At  any  rate,  he  acted  according  to  his  demo- 
cratic principles  and  to  his  conception  of  his  duty. 

91 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

His  principles  were  in  a  sense  different  from  those 
of  President  Cleveland,  with  whom  he  disagreed  in 
that  notable  instance  when  the  President  in  his  vig- 
orous, practical  way  sent  federal  troops  into  Chi- 
cago; the  Governor  protested,  as  one  of  his  prede- 
cessors in  the  governor's  office,  Senator  Palmer,  had 
protested  when  President  Grant  sent  federal  troops 
under  Phil  Sheridan  into  Chicago  at  the  time  of  the 
great  fire.  Almost  everybody  who  had  any  way  of 
making  his  voice  heard  sided  with  President  Cleve- 
land, and  the  end  of  the  strike  was  accredited  to 
him.  Doubtless  the  grim  presence  of  those  regular 
troops  did  overawe  the  hoodlums  who  had  taken  ad- 
vantage of  the  strike  to  create  disorder,  but  if  the 
credit  must  go  to  armed  force,  the  report  by  Major, 
or,  as  he  was  in  those  days,  Lieutenant,  Baker  shows 
that  that  little  company  of  the  Illinois  National 
Guard  which  ruthlessly  fired  into  the  mob  at  Loomis 
Street  one  night  virtually  ended  the  disorder. 

Perhaps  Governor  Altgeld  was  willing  to  forego 
any  "credit"  for  an  act,  which,  however  necessary 
to  the  preservation  of  order,  demanded  so  many 
lives.  I  do  not  know  as  to  that,  but  I  do  recall  the 
expression  which  clouded  his  face  that  afternoon 
we  arrived  at  Lemont,  during  the  strike  at  the  drain- 
age canal.  It  occurred  a  year  before  the  railway 
strike,  and  the  Governor  had  gone  to  Lemont  him- 
self to  make  an  investigation.  He  had  asked  Lieu- 
tenant Baker  and  me  to  go  with  him,  and  when  we 
got  off  the  train  at  Lemont,  on  the  afternoon  of 
a  cheerless  day,  the  crowds  were  standing  aimlessly 
about,  watching  with  a  sullen  curiosity  the  arrival 

92 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

of  the  militia.  The  soldiers  were  just  then  going 
into  camp  on  the  level  rocks  by  a  bridge  across  the 
canal  and  the  Desplaines  River — the  bridge,  accord- 
ing to  the  military  scientists,  was,  I  believe,  consid- 
ered, for  some  mysterious  reason,  to  be  a  strategic 
point. 

The  picture  was  one  for  the  brush  of  Remington 
— those  young  blue-clad  soldiers  (it  was  before  the 
days  of  our  imperialism,  and  of  the  khaki  our  sol- 
diers now  imitate  the  British  in  wearing) — and 
Baker  and  I  stood  and  gazed  at  it  a  moment,  af- 
fected by  the  fascination  there  always  is  in  the 
superficial  military  spectacle;  and  then,  suddenly, 
we  were  aware  that  there  was  another  and  more 
dramatic  point  of  interest,  where  a  group  stood 
about  the  body  of  a  workman  who  had  been  shot  in 
the  riots  of  that  morning.  He  was  a  foreigner, 
the  clothes  he  wore  doubtless  those  he  had  had  on 
when  he  passed  under  the  Statue  of  Liberty,  com- 
ing to  this  land  with  what  hopes  of  freedom  in  his 
breast  no  one  can  ever  know.  The  wife  who  had 
come  with  him  was  on  her  knees  beside  him,  rocking 
back  and  forth  in  her  grief,  dumb  as  to  any  words 
in  a  strange  land  whose  tongue  she  could  not  speak 
or  understand. 

The  reporters  from  the  Chicago  newspapers  were 
there,  and  among  them  Eddie  Bernard,  an  old 
Whitechapeler,  who  told  us  that  the  man  had 
reached  Lemont  only  a  few  days  before,  and  had 
been  happy  in  the  job  he  had  so  promptly  found 
in  the  new  land  of  promise.  And  now,  there  he 
lay,  shot  dead.     Bernard  looked  a  moment,  and  then 

93 


FORTY   YEARS    OF   IT 

in  the  irony  of  a  single  phrase  he  expressed  the 
whole  drama  as  he  said: 

"The  land  of  the  free  and  the  home  of  the  brave !" 
That  was  fundamental,  anyhow,  and  politics  were 
not  going  deeply  into  the  question,  except  as  such 
men  as  Altgeld  did  so,  and  even  they  were  criti- 
cized sharply  for  attempting  it.  And  one  might  well 
be  disgusted  with  politics,  then  and  always,  and 
think  of  something  that  has  the  consolation  of  litera- 
ture. The  traffic  of  politicians,  as  Mr.  George  Moore 
somewhere  says,  is  with  the  things  of  this  world, 
while  art  is  concerned  with  the  dreams,  the  visions 
and  the  aspirations  of  a  world  beyond  this.  Though 
literature  must  some  day  in  this  land  concern  itself 
with  that  very  question  of  labor,  since  it  is  with  fun- 
damental life  that  art  must  deal,  and  be  true  in  its 
dealing. 

XVII 

Politics  in  those  days — and  not  alone  in  those  days 
either — were  mean,  and  while  I  do  not  intend  to  say 
that  this  meanness  bowed  me  with  despair,  it  did  fill 
me  with  disgust,  and  made  the  whole  business  utterly 
distasteful.  Politics  were  almost  wholly  personal, 
there  was  then  no  conception  of  them  as  related  to 
social  life.  An  awakening  was  coming,  to  be  sure, 
and  the  signs  were  then  apparent,  even  if  but  few  saw 
them.  They  were  to  most  quite  dim ;  but  there  were 
here  and  there  in  the  land  dreamers  of  a  sort,  who 
had  caught  a  new  vision.  The  feeling  of  it,  the  emo- 
tion, was  to  find  expression  in  Mr.  Bryan's  great 

94 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

campaign  in  1896;  but  there  was  then  in  Chicago  a 
little  group,  men  who  had  read  Henry  George,  or, 
without  reading  him,  had  looked  out  on  life  intelli- 
gently and  gained  a  concept  of  it,  or  perhaps  had 
merely  felt  in  themselves  the  stirrings  of  a  new  social 
instinct,  and  these  saw,  or  thought  they  saw,  the  way 
to  a  better  social  order.  They  could  not  in  those 
days  gain  so  patient  a  hearing  for  their  views  as  they 
have  since,  if  any  hearing  they  have  had  may  after 
all  be  called  patient;  they  were  not  so  very  patient 
themselves,  perhaps,  as  men  are  quite  apt  not  to  be 
when  they  think  they  see  as  clearly  as  though  a  per- 
petual lightning  blazed  in  the  sky  exactly  what  is  the 
matter  with  the  world,  and  have  a  simple  formula, 
which,  were  it  but  tried,  would  instantly  and  infalli- 
bly make  everything  all  right. 

But  these  men  were  not  in  politics ;  some  of  them 
were  too  impractical  ever  to  be,  and  the  only  man 
in  politics  who  understood  them  at  all  was  Altgeld. 
Generally,  the  moral  atmosphere  of  politics  was  foul 
and  heavy  with  the  feculence  of  all  the  debauchery 
that  is  inseparable  from  privilege.  The  personnel 
of  politics  was  generally  low;  and  in  city  councils 
and  state  legislatures  there  was  a  cynical  contempt 
of  all  the  finer  sentiments.  It  was  not  alone  that 
provincialism  and  philistinism  which  stand  so  ob- 
durately and  with  such  bovine  stupidity  in  the  way 
of  progress ;  there  was  a  positive  scorn  of  the  virtues, 
and  the  alliance  between  the  lobbyists  and  the  lawyers 
of  the  great  corporation  interests  on  the  one  hand, 
and  the  managers  of  both  the  great  political  parties 
on  the  other,  was  a  fact,  the  worst  feature  of  which 

95 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

was  that  no  one  seemed  to  care,  or  if  a  few  did  care, 
they  did  not  know  what  to  do  about  it.  It  was  a 
joke  among  the  newspaper  men,  who  had  little  re- 
spect for  the  men  who  filled  the  positions  of  power 
and  responsibility;  the  wonder  was,  indeed,  after 
such  association,  that  they  had  any  respect  left  for 
anything  in  the  world.  Only  the  other  day,  reading 
Walt  Whitman's  terrific  arraignment  of  the  powers 
that  were  in  control  of  the  government  of  the  nation 
in  Buchanan's  time,  his  awful  catalogue  of  the  sorts 
of  men  who  composed  the  directorate  of  affairs, — it 
may  be  read  in  his  prose  works  by  those  who  wish, — 
I  was  struck  by  the  similarity  in  this  respect  of  that 
time  with  that  which  immediately  preceded  the  newer 
and  better  time  of  the  moral  awakening  in  America. 
Altgeld  was  one  of  the  forerunners  of  this  time ;  and, 
in  accordance  with  the  universal  law  of  human  na- 
ture, it  was  his  fate  to  be  misunderstood  and  ridi- 
culed and  hated,  even  by  many  in  his  own  party.  He 
was  far  in  the  van  in  most  ways,  so  far  that  it  was 
impossible  for  his  own  party  to  follow  him.  It  did 
not  follow  him  in  his  opposition  to  a  bill  which  was 
passed  in  the  General  Assembly  to  permit  of  the 
consolidation  of  gas  companies  in  Chicago;  the  ma- 
chines of  the  two  parties  were  working  well  together 
in  the  legislature — in  one  of  those  bipartizan  alli- 
ances which  were  not  to  be  understood  until  many 
years  later,  and  even  then  not  to  be  understood  so 
very  clearly,  since  most  of  our  cities  have  been  gov- 
erned since  by  such  alliances,  in  the  interest  of  sim- 
ilar gas  companies  and  other  public-utility  corpora- 
tions— and    when    the    Governor    vetoed    their    evil 

96 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

measure,  this  same  bipartizan  machine  sought  to 
pass  it  over  his  veto,  and  none  was  more  active  in 
the  effort  than  were  the  leaders  of  his  own  party  in 
the  House. 

The  supreme  effort  was  made  on  the  last  night 
of  the  session,  amidst  one  of  those  riots  which  mark 
the  dissolution  of  our  deliberative  legislative  bodies. 
The  lobbyists  for  the  measure  were  quite  shameless 
that  night,  as  they  were  on  most  nights,  no  doubt ; 
almost  as  shameless  as  the  legislators  themselves. 
The  House  was  in  its  shirt-sleeves ;  and  there  was 
the  rude  horse-play  of  country  bumpkins ;  paper 
wads  were  flying,  now  and  then  some  member 
sent  hurtling  through  the  hot  air  his  file  of 
printed  legislative  bills,  and  all  the  while  there  was 
that  confusion  of  sound,  laughter,  and  oaths  and 
snatches  of  song,  a  sort  of  bedlam,  in  which  laws 
were  being  enacted — laws  that  must  be  respected 
and  even  revered,  because  of  their  sacred  origin. 
The  leaders  were  serious,  but  worried;  the  expres- 
sions of  their  drawn,  tense,  nervous  faces  were  un- 
happy in  suspicion  and  fear,  and,  perhaps,  because 
of  uneasy  consciences.  The  speaker  sat  above  them, 
pale  and  haggard,  rapping  his  splintered  sounding- 
board  with  a  broken  gavel,  rapping  persistently  and 
futilely.  And  as  the  time  drew  near  when  the  gas  bill 
was  to  come  on  for  consideration,  the  nervous  ten- 
sion was  intensified,  and  evil  hung  almost  palpably 
in  the  hot,  close  air  of  that  chamber.  Those  who 
have  had  experience  of  legislative  bodies,  and  have 
by  practice  learned  something  of  political  aeroscopy, 
can   always   tell  when   "something  is   coming   off"; 

97 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

political  correspondents  have  cultivated  the  sense, 
and  that  night  they  could  have  divined  nothing  good 
or  pure  or  beautiful  in  that  chamber  (where  the 
portraits  of  Lincoln  and  of  Douglas  hung),  unless 
it  were  the  mellow  music,  now  and  then,  of  the  glass 
prisms  of  the  chandeliers  hanging  high  from  the 
garish  ceiling,  as  they  tinkled  and  chimed  whenever 
some  little  breeze  wandered  in  from  the  June  night. 

And  yet  there  was  beauty  there,  moral  beauty,  as 
there  ever  is  somewhere  in  man.  Out  on  the  edge 
of  that  bedlam,  standing  under  the  gallery  on  the 
Democratic  side,  near  the  cloak-room,  stood  a  tall, 
lank  man.  You  would  have  known  him  at  once,  any- 
where, as  an  Egyptian,  as  we  called  those  who  had 
come  from  the  Illinois  land  south  of  the  old  O.  &  M. 
railroad.  He  was  uncouth  in  appearance;  he  wore 
drab,  ill-fitting  clothes,  and  at  his  wrinkled  throat 
there  was  no  collar.  He  was  a  member,  sent  there 
from  some  rural  district  far  down  in  the  southern  end 
of  the  state ;  and  all  through  the  session  he  had  been 
silent,  taking  no  part,  except  to  vote,  and  to  vote, 
on  most  occasions,  with  his  party,  which,  in  those 
days,  was  the  whole  duty  of  man.  This  night  would 
see  the  end  of  his  political  career,  if  his  brief  ex- 
perience in  an  obscure  position  could  be  called  a 
career,  and  he  stood  there,  silently  looking  on, 
plucking  now  and  then  at  his  chin,  his  long,  wrin- 
kled face  brown  and  solemn  and  inscrutable. 

The  old  Egyptian  stood  there  while  the  long  roll 
was  being  called,  and  the  crisis  approached,  and 
the  nervous  tension  was  a  keen  pain.  And  suddenly 
one  of  the  gas  lobbyists  went  up  to  him,  there  on 

98 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

the  verge  of  the  House,  and  began  to  talk  with  him. 
I  had  the  story  a  good  while  afterwards  from  one 
of  the  whips,  who,  it  seemed,  knew  all  that  had  gone 
on  that  night.  The  lobbyist  of  course  knew  about 
the  man,  knew  especially  about  his  necessities,  as 
lobbyists  do;  and  he  began  to  talk  to  the  old  fel- 
low about  them — about  his  poverty  and  his  children, 
and  he  used  the  old  argument  which  has  been  em- 
ployed so  long  and  so  successfully  with  the  rural 
members  of  all  our  legislatures,  and  has  been  the 
source  of  so  much  evil  in  our  city  governments,  that 
is,  the  argument  that  the  bill  concerned  onty  Chi- 
cago, and  that  the  folks  down  home  would  neither 
know  nor  care  how  he  voted  on  it,  and  then — how 
much  two  thousand  dollars  would  mean  to  him.  As 
the  lobbyist  talked,  there  were  various  eyes  that 
looked  at  him,  waiting  for  a  sign;  they  needed  only 
a  few  votes  then,  and  the  roll-call  was  being  delayed 
by  one  pretense  and  another,  and  the  clock  on  the 
wall,  inexorably  ticking  toward  the  hour  of  that 
legislature's  dissolution,  was  turned  back.  The  old 
fellow  listened  and  stroked  his  chin,  and  then  pres- 
ently, when  the  lobbyist  had  done,  he  turned  his 
old  blue  eyes  on  him  and  said: 

"I  reckon  you're  right:  I'm  poor,  and  I've  got  a 
big  family.  And  you're  right,  too,  when  you  say 
my  people  won't  know  nor  care:  they  won't;  they 
don't  know  nor  care  a  damn;  they  won't  send  me 
back  here,  of  course.  And  God  knows  what's  to 
come  of  my  wife  and  my  children ;  I  am  going  home 
to  them  to-morrow  and  on  Monday  I'm  going  to 
hunt  me  a  job  in  the  harvest-field;  I  reckon  I'll  die 

99 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

in  the  poorhouse.  Yes,  I'm  going  home — but" — 
he  stopped  and  looked  the  lobbyist  in  the  eye — "I'm 
going  home  an  honest  man." 

My  friend  the  whip  told  me  the  story  as  a  curi- 
ous and  somewhat  confusing  flaw  in  his  theory  that 
every  man  is  for  sale, — "most  of  them  damned 
cheap,"  he  said, — and  he  thought  it  might  make  a 
plot  for  a  story;  like  many  men  I  have  known  he 
was  incorrigibly  romantic,  and  was  always  giving 
me  plots  for  stories.  Well,  they  failed  to  pass  the 
bill  over  the  Governor's  veto,  and  it  was  not  long 
until  another  story  was  pretty  well  known  in  Illinois, 
about  that  Governor  who  that  night  was  sitting  up 
over  in  the  executive  mansion,  awaiting  the  action 
of  the  general  assembly.  The  story  was  that  a 
large  quantity  of  the  bonds  of  the  gas  company  had 
been  placed  at  his  disposal  in  a  security  vault  in 
Chicago,  in  a  box  to  which  a  man  was  to  deliver 
him  the  key;  all  he  had  to  do  was  to  go  take  the 
bonds — and  permit  the  bill  to  become  a  law.  His 
answer,  of  course,  was  the  veto — an  offense  as  un- 
pardonable as  the  pardoning  of  the  anarchists ;  and 
no  doubt  many  such  offenses  against  the  invisible 
power  in  the  land  were  more  potent  in  bringing  down 
on  his  head  that  awful  hatred  than  his  mercy  had 
been — though  this  was  made  to  serve  as  reason  for 
the  hatred.     Privilege,  of  course,  hates  mercy,  too. 

The  old  Egyptian  went  back  home,  and  I  have 
always  hoped  that  he  found  a  better  job  than  he 
went  to  seek  in  the  harvest-fields,  and  that  he  did 
not  die  at  last  in  the  poorhouse;  but  he  was  never 
heard  of  more,  and  it  was  not  long  until  the  Gov- 

100 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

ernor  was  driven  from  his  office  amid  the  hoots  and 
jeers  and  the  hissing  of  a  venomous  hatred  such  as 
nothing  but  political  rancor  knows,  unless  it  be  re- 
ligious rancor.  Yes,  politics  had  got  pretty  low  in 
those  days,  and  its  utter  meanness,  gradually  re- 
vealed, was  enough  to  cause  one  to  despair  of  his 
country  and  his  kind.  Perhaps  the  old  Egyptian 
in  the  legislature  and  the  idealist  in  the  governor's 
chair  should  have  been  enough  to  keep  one  from  des- 
pairing altogether,  though  one  honest  old  peasant 
cannot  save  a  legislature  any  more  than  one  swal- 
low can  make  a  summer.  I  do  not  mean  to  say  that 
he  was  the  only  honest  man  in  the  legislature:  there 
were  many  others,  of  course,  but  partizan  politics 
prevented  their  honesty  from  being  of  much  avail; 
or,  at  any  rate,  they  did  not  control  events.  With 
the  measurable  advance  in  thought  since  that  time, 
and  the  general  progress  of  the  species,  we  know 
now  that  men  do  not  control  events  half  so  much 
as  events  control  men;  we  do  not  know  exactly  what 
it  is  that  does  control  men — that  is,  those  of  us  who 
are  not  Socialists  do  not  know. 

Altgeld,  at  any  rate,  was  disgusted  with  politics, 
as  well  he  might  have  been,  since  they  wrecked  his 
fortune  and  broke  his  heart.  And  it  was  with  re- 
lief, I  know,  that  he  said  that  morning, — almost  the 
last  he  passed  in  the  governor's  chair, — as  he  and 
I  were  going  up  the  long  walk  to  the  State  House 
steps : 

"Well,  we're  rid  of  this,  anyway." 


101 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 


XVIII 

That  peculiar  form  of  human  activity,  or  inac- 
tivity, known  as  getting  a  law  practice,  has  been 
so  abundantly  treated  on  the  printed  page  that  I 
have  not  the  temerity  to  add  to  the  literature  on 
the  interesting  subject.  The  experience  is  never 
dramatic,  even  if  it  is  sometimes  tragic,  and  it  is 
so  often  tragic  that  there  has  seemed  no  other  re- 
course for  mankind  than,  by  one  of  those  tacit  un- 
derstandings on  which  our  race  gets  through  life,  to 
view  it  as  a  comedy.  It  is  no  comedy,  of  course, 
to  the  chief  actor,  who  is  sustained  only  by  his 
dreams,  his  illusions,  and  his  ideals,  and  he  may 
count  himself  successful  perhaps,  if,  when  he  has  lost 
his  illusions,  he  can  retain  at  least  some  of  his  ideals, 
though  the  law  is  too  apt  to  strip  him  of  both. 
However  that  may  be,  in  my  own  experience  in  that 
sort  there  was  an  incident  which  made  its  peculiar 
impressions ;  indeed,  there  were  several  such  inci- 
dents, but  the  one  which  I  have  in  mind  involves  the 

perhaps  commonplace  story  of  Maria  R ,  which 

ran  like  a  serial  during  those  trying  years. 

I  had  intended  to  take  up  the  practice  of  law 
in  Chicago;  I  was  quite  certain  that  there  I  should 
set  up  my  little  enterprise,  and  this  self-same  cer- 
tainty is  perhaps  the  reason  why  I  found  myself 
bnck  in  Toledo,  in  a  lonely  little  office  in  one  of  the 
new  office  buildings ;  sky-scrapers  they  were  called 
in  the  new  sense  of  metropolitan  life  that  then  be- 
gan to  pervade  the  town;  they  were  not  so  very 

10S 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

high,  but  they  seemed  high  enough  to  scrape  the 
low  skies  which  arch  so  many  of  the  grey  days  in 
the  lake  region.  It  was  as  long  ago,  I  believe,  as 
the  time  of  Pythagoras  that  the  law  of  the  certain 
uncertainty  of  certainty  was  deduced  for  the  hum- 
bling of  human  pride,  and  when  my  certainties  with 
regard  to  Chicago  proved  all  to  be  broken  reeds, 
there  were  more  gray  days  in  that  region  of  the 
intemperate  zone  than  the  meteorological  records 
show.  The  little  law  office  had  a  portrait  of  Wil- 
liam Dean  Howells  on  its  walls,  and  in  time  the  por- 
traits of  other  writers,  differing  from  those  other 
law  offices  which  prefer  to  be  adorned  with  pictures 
of  Chief  Justice  Marshall — a  strong  man,  of  course, 
who  wrote  some  strong  fiction,  too,  in  his  day — and 
of  Hamilton  and  of  Jefferson,  indicating  either  a 
catholicity  or  a  confusion  of  principle  on  the  part 
of  the  occupying  proprietor,  of  which  usually  he  is 
not  himself  aware.  There  were  a  few  law  books,  too, 
and  on  the  desk  a  little  digest  of  the  law  of  evidence 
as  affected  by  the  decisions  of  the  Ohio  courts.  I 
had  the  noble  intention  of  mastering  it,  but  I  did 
not  read  in  it  very  much,  since  for  a  long  while 
there  was  no  one  to  pay  me  for  doing  so,  and  I 
spent  most  of  my  hours  at  my  desk  over  a  manu- 
script of  "The  13th  District,"  a  novel  of  politics  I 
was  then  writing,  looking  up  now  and  then  and  gaz- 
ing out  of  the  window  at  the  blank  rear  walls  of  cer- 
tain brick  buildings  which  made  a  dreary  prospect, 
even  if  one  of  them  did  bear,  as  I  well  remember,  the 
bright  and  reassuring  legend,  "Money  to  Loan  at  6 
per  cent." 

103 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

There  were  not  many  interruptions  at  first,  but 
after  a  while,  when  I  had  been  appointed  as  attor- 
ney to  a  humane  society,  there  were  times  when  I 
had  to  lay  my  manuscripts  aside.  I  felt  it  to  be,  in 
a  way,  my  duty  to  long  for  such  interruptions,  but 
they  usually  came  just  at  those  times  when  I  was 
most  absorbed  in  my  manuscript,  so  that  their  wel- 
come, while  affectedly  polite,  was  not  wholly  from 
the  heart.  One  of  these  intrusions  resulted  in  a 
long  trial  before  a  justice  of  the  peace;  it  was  a 
case  that  grew  out  of  a  neighborhood  quarrel,  and 
all  the  inhabitants  of  the  locus  in  quo  were  sub- 
poenaed as  witnesses.  Such  a  case  of  course  always 
affords  an  opportunity  to  study  human  nature;  but 
this  one,  too,  had  the  effect  ultimately  of  bringing 
in  many  clients — and,  as  Altgeld  had  said,  by  way 
of  advice  to  me,  got  people  in  the  habit  of  coming 
to  my  office.  Those  witnesses  acquired  that  habit, 
and  since  human  nature  seemed  to  run  pretty  high 
in  that  neighborhood  most  of  the  time,  they  got  into 
a  good  deal  of  trouble;  they  were  most  of  them  so 
poor  that  they  seldom  got  into  anything  else,  unless 
it  were  the  jail  or  the  workhouse,  and  some  of  them 
were  always  ready  to  help  send  others  of  them  to 
those  places.     Out  of  the  long  file  of  poor  miserable 

creatures  there  emerged  one  day  that  Maria  R 

of  whom  I  spoke.  She  was  a  buxom  young  German 
emigrant,  not  long  over  from  Pomerania,  and  her 
fair  skin  and  yellow  hair,  and  a  certain  manner  she 
had,  marked  her  out  from  all  the  rest.  She  came 
with  her  children  one  morning  to  complain  of  her 
husband's  neglect  of  them;  and  to  her,  as  to  the 

104 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

whole  body  of  society  which  thinks  no  more  deeply 
than  she  did,  it  seemed  the  necessary,  proper,  and 
even  indispensable  thing  to  put  Rheinhold — that  was 
her  husband's  name — in  jail.  (You  should  have 
heard  her  speak  the  name  Rheinhold,  with  that  de- 
licious note  in  which  she  grasseyed  her  r's.)  There 
she  sat,  on  the  little  chair  by  the  window,  with  her 
stupidly  staring  boy  and  girl  at  her  knees,  but  in 
her  arms  the  brightest,  prettiest,  flaxen-haired  baby 
in  the  world,  a  little  elf  who  was  always  smiling, 
and  picking  at  her  mother's  nose  or  cheeks  with 
her  fat  little  fingers,  and  when  she  smiled,  her 
mother  smiled,  too ;  it  was  the  only  time  she  ever 
did. 

Rheinhold  of  course  drank;  he  "mistreated"  his 
children — that  is,  he  did  not  buy  them  food.  And 
since  the  Humane  Society  was  organized  and  main- 
tained for  the  explicit  purpose  of  forcing  people  to 
be  humane,  even  though  it  had  to  be  inhumane  to 
accomplish  its  purpose,  the  duty  of  its  attorney  was 
clear. 

Its  attorney  just  then  felt  in  himself  a  rising  in- 
dignation, moral  of  course,  yet  very  much  like  a 
vulgar  anger.  To  look  at  those  children,  especially 
at  that  baby  of  which  Maria  was  so  fond,  much 
fonder  it  was  plain  to  be  seen  than  of  the  other 
two,  and  to  think  of  a  man  not  providing  for  them, 
was  to  have  a  rage  against  him,  the  rage  which  so- 
ciety, so  remorselessly  moral  in  the  mass,  bears 
against  all  offenders — the  rage  a  good  prosecutor 
must  keep  alive  and  flaming  in  his  breast  if  he 
would  nerve  himself  to  his  task  and  earn  his  fees 

105 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

and  society's  gratitude.  And  whom  does  society  re- 
ward so  lavishly  as  her  prosecutors? 

However,  that  is  not  the  strain  I  would  adopt 
just  now.  I  felt  that  very  rage  in  myself  at  that 
moment,  and  straightway  went  and  had  Rheinhold 
arrested  and  haled  before  a  judge  in  the  Municipal 
Court,  charged  with  the  crime  of  neglecting  his  chil- 
dren. I  can  remember  his  wild  and  bewildered  look 
as  he  was  arraigned  that  morning.  The  informa- 
tion was  read  to  him,  and  he  moved  his  head  in 
such  instant  acquiescence  that  the  judge,  looking 
down  from  his  bench,  asked  him  if  he  wished  to  plead 
guilty,  and  he  said  "Yes."  It  seemed  then  that 
the  case  was  to  be  quite  easily  disposed  of,  and  the 
prosecutor  might  feel  gratified  by  this  instant  suc- 
cess of  his  work;  and  yet  Rheinhold  stood  there  so 
confused,  so  frightened,  with  the  court-room  loung- 
ers looking  on,  that  I  said: 

"He  doesn't  understand  a  word  of  all  you  are 
saying." 

And  so  the  judge  entered  a  plea  of  "not  guilty." 

I  knew  a  young  lawyer  with  rather  large  leisure, 
and  I  asked  him  to  defend  Rheinhold.  He  was  glad 
to  do  so,  and  we  empaneled  a  jury  and  went  at  what 
Professor  Wigmore  calls  the  "high-class  sport."  We 
became  desperately  interested  of  course,  and  for 
days  wrangled  according  to  the  rules  of  the  game 
over  the  liberty  of  the  bewildered  little  German  who 
scarcely  knew  what  it  was  all  about.  Now  and  then 
he  made  some  wild,  inarticulate  protest,  but  was 
of  course  promptly  silenced  by  his  own  lawyer,  or 
by  the  judge,  or  by  the  rules  of  evidence,  which 

106 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

could  be  invoked — with  a  deep  sense  of  satisfaction 
when  the  court  ruled  your  way — to  prevent  him 
from  telling  something  he  had  on  his  mind,  some- 
thing that  to  him  seemed  entirely  exculpatory,  some- 
thing that  would  make  the  whole  clouded  situation 
clear  if  it  could  only  find  its  way  to  the  light  and 
to   the  knowledge   of  mankind. 

There  was  a  witness  against  him,  a  tall,  slender 
young  German  shoemaker,  and  it  was  against  him 
that  Rheinhold's  outcries  were  directed.  It  was 
not  clear  just  what  he  was  trying  to  say,  and  there 
was  small  disposition  to  help  him  make  it  clear. 
His  lawyer  indeed  seemed  embarrassed,  as  though  in 
making  his  incoherent  interruptions  Rheinhold  were 
committing  a  contretemps;  he  must  wait  for  his 
turn  to  testify,  that  all  might  be  done  in  order  and 
according  to  the  ancient  rules  and  precedents,  and, 
in  a  word,  as  it  should  be  done.  Under  the  rules 
of  evidence,  of  course,  Rheinhold  could  not  be  al- 
lowed to  express  his  opinion  of  the  shoemaker ;  that 
was  not  permissible.  The  court  could  not  be  con- 
cerned with  the  passions  of  the  human  heart;  this 
man  before  the  court  had  a  family,  and  he  had  neg- 
lected to  provide  food  for  it,  and  for  such  a  con- 
dition it  was  written  and  printed  in  a  book  that  the 
appropriate  remedy  was  a  certain  number  of  days 
or  months  in  the  workhouse. 

And  so  while  Rheinhold  silently  and  philosophi- 
cally acquiesced,  we  tried  him  during  one  whole  day, 
we  argued  nearly  all  the  next  day  to  the  jury,  and 
the  jury  stayed  out  all  that  night  and  in  the 
morning     returned     a     verdict     of     guilty.       And 

107 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

Rheinhold    was    sent    to    the    workhouse    for    nine 
months. 


XIX 

It  was  regarded  as  a  triumph  for  the  Humane 
Society, — the  newspapers  had  printed  accounts  of 
the  trial, — but  it  was  a  victory  of  which  I  felt  pretty 
much  ashamed;  it  all  seemed  so  useless,  so  absurd, 
so  barbarous,  when  you  came  to  think  of  it,  and 
what  good  it  had  done  Maria,  or  anyone,  it  was 
difficult  to  determine.  And  so,  before  very  long,  I 
went  to  the  workhouse  board  and  had  Rheinhold 
paroled,  and  he  disappeared,  vanished  toward  the 
West,  and  was  never  heard  of  more. 

Meanwhile  Maria  lived  on  in  her  little  house  as 
best  she  could,  and  with  what  assistance  we  could 
provide  her.  The  Humane  Society  helped  a  little, 
and  my  wife  made  some  clothes  for  the  baby,  and 
a  good-natured  doctor  in  the  neighborhood  at- 
tended them  when  they  were  sick,  which  was  a  good 
deal  of  the  time;  and  Maria  seemed  happy  enough 
and  contented,  relying  with  such  entire  confidence 
on  her  friends  that  one  cold  night  she  sent  for  me 
in  great  urgency,  and  when  I  arrived  she  pointed 
to  the  stove,  which  was  smoking  and  not  doing  its 
work  in  a  satisfactory  manner  at  all.  I  mended  it 
and  got  the  fire  going,  and  they  managed  to  sur- 
vive the  winter;  and  when  spring  came  Maria  ap- 
peared at  the  office  and  wished  to  apply  to  the  courts 
for  a  divorce.     It  seemed  as  good  a  thing  to  do  as 

108 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

any,  and  the  evidence  of  Rheinhold's  cruel  neglect 
was  by  this  time  so  conclusive  that  it  was  not  much 
trouble  to  obtain  a  decree,  especially  as  the  case 
came  before  a  delightful  old  bachelor  judge  who  felt 
that  if  people  were  not  divorced  they  ought  to  be; 
and  after  listening  to  two  of  the  five  or  six  witnesses 
I  had  subpoenaed  he  granted  Maria  her  freedom. 

And  the  next  day  she  got  married  again.  The 
bridegroom  was  that  very  shoemaker  who  had  testi- 
fied in  Rheinhold's  trial;  he  lived  not  far  from  Ma- 
ria's late  residence,  and  the  happy  event,  as  I 
learned  then,  was  the  culmination  of  a  romance 
which  had  disturbed  Rheinhold  to  such  a  degree  that 
he  had  preferred  to  be  anywhere  rather  than  at 
home;  and  it  seemed  now — it  was  now  indeed  quite 
clear — that  what  he  had  been  trying  to  explain  at 
the  time  of  the  trial  was  that  his  fate  was  involved  in 
the  eternal  triangle. 

I  do  not  know  where  Rheinhold  is  now;  as  I  said, 
he  was  never  heard  of  more,  but  I  should  like  to 
present  my  apologies  to  him  and  to  inform  him  that 
as  a  result  of  that  expedition  into  the  jungle  of  the 
law  in  search  of  justice  I  discovered  that  whatever 
other  men  might  do,  I  could  never  again  prosecute 
anyone  for  anything;  and  I  never  did.  And  I  think 
that  most  of  the  attempts  men  make  to  do  justice 
in  their  criminal  courts  are  about  as  mistaken,  about 
as  absurd,  about  as  ridiculous,  as  that  solemn  and 
supremely  silly  effort  we  made  to  deal  with  such 
a  human  complication  by  means  of  calf-bound  law- 
books, and  wrangling  lawyers,  and  twelve  stupid 
jurors     ranged     behind     twelve     spittoons.      The 

109 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

whole  experience  revealed  to  me  the  beauty  and  the 
truth  in  that  wise  passage  in  Mr.  Howells's  charm- 
ing book,  "A  Boy's  Town": 

"In  fact,  it  seems  best  to  be  very  careful  how  we 
try  to  do  justice  in  this  world,  and  mostly  to  leave 
retribution  of  all  kinds  to  God,  who  really  knows 
about  things ;  and  content  ourselves  as  much  as  pos- 
sible with  mercy,  whose  mistakes  are  not  so  irre- 
parable." 

That  passage,  I  think,  contains  a  whole  and  en- 
tirely adequate  philosophy  of  life;  but  I  suppose 
that  those  who  shake  their  heads  at  such  heresies 
will  be  equally  shocked  to  learn  that  Maria's  second 
venture  proved  to  be  a  remarkable  success. 

The  shoemaker  was  a  frugal  chap, — the  evidence 
discloses,  I  think,  that  he  had  been  an  unusually 
frugal  lover, — and  he  had  saved  some  money,  which, 
it  seems,  he  was  determined  not  to  spend  on  his  fair 
one  until  he  could  develop  some  legal  claim  to  her, 
but  he  treated  her  handsomely  then,  according  to  his 
taste  and  ability.  He  bought  a  house  in  another 
and  better  part  of  town,  and  he  furnished  it  in  a 
way  that  dazzled  the  eyes  of  those  children  who 
had  been  accustomed  to  bare  floors  and  had  never 
known  the  glories  of  golden  oak  and  blue  and  yel- 
low and  red  plush,  ingrain  carpets,  and  chenille 
hangings;  and  he  clothed  them  all  and  sent  them 
to  school,  and  finally  they  all  took  his  name,  and,  I 
think,  forgot  poor  Rheinhold  altogether.  And  so, 
in  their  new-found  prosperity,  they  vanished  out  of 
my  sight,  and  I  heard  of  them  no  more  for  years. 
Then  one  day  Maria's  little  daughter,  grown  into  a 

110 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

tall  young  girl  by  that  time,  came  to  tell  me  that 
her  mother  was  dead.  Maria  had  started  down  town 
with  her  husband,  on  Christmas  Eve,  to  buy  the  gifts 
for  her  children,  and  in  the  heavy  snow  that  was 
falling  a  defective  sidewalk  was  hidden,  and  Maria 
was  thrown  to  the  ground  and  so  hurt  that  she  died. 
Her  last  words  to  her  daughter  had  been,  so  the 
girl  said,  "See  Mr.  Whitlock;  he'll  do  what  should 
be  done."  Her  heirs  had  a  clear  case  against  the 
city,  but  I  had  just  been  elected  mayor  that  autumn 
and  could  not  prosecute  such  a  claim.  Another  law- 
yer did  so,  and  got  damages  for  the  children,  and 
even  for  the  husband,  and  with  these  funds  in  a 
trust  company's  keeping  the  shoemaker  educated 
all  the  children.  And  he  wore  about  his  hat  the 
thickest  band  of  heavy  crepe  that  I  ever  saw. 

It  seemed  to  annoy,  and  in  some  cases  even  to 
anger,  those  whom  I  told  of  my  resolution  not  to 
prosecute  anyone  any  more.  They  would  argue 
about  it  with  me  as  if  it  made  some  real  difference 
to  them;  if  every  lawyer  and  every  man  were  so  to. 
decide,  they  said,  who  was  to  proceed  against  the 
criminals,  who  was  to  do  the  work  of  purifying  and 
regenerating  society?  It  has  always  been,  of  course, 
a  most  interesting  and  vital  question  as  to  who  is 
to  do  the  dirty  work  of  all  kinds  in  this  world;  but 
their  apprehensions,  as  I  could  assure  them,  were 
all  unfounded,  since  there  are  always  plenty  of  law- 
yers, and  always  plenty  of  them  who  are  not  only 
willing  but  anxious  to  act  as  prosecutors,  and  to 
put  into  their  work  that  energy  and  enthusiasm 
which  the  schools  of  efficiency  urge  upon  the  youth 

111 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

of  the  land,  and  to  prosecute  with  a  ferocity  that 
could  be  no  more  intense  if  they  had  suffered  some  in- 
jury in  their  own  persons  from  the  accused.  And 
there  are  even  men  who  are  willing,  for  the  most 
meager  salaries,  to  act  as  guards  and  wardens  in 
prisons,  and  to  do  all  manner  of  things,  even  to  com- 
mit crimes,  or  at  least  moral  wrongs,  in  order  to  put 
men  into  prison  and  keep  them  there,  unless  they 
can  kill  them,  and  there  are  plenty  who  are  willing 
to  do  that,  if  only  society  provides  them  with  a  rope 
or  a  wire  to  do  it  with. 


XX 


There  was,  however,  in  Toledo  one  man  who  could 
sympathize  with  my  attitude;  and  that  was  a  man 
whose  determination  to  accept  literally  and  to  try  to 
practice  the  fundamental  philosophy  of  Christi- 
anity had  so  startled  and  confounded  the  Christians 
everywhere  that  he  at  once  became  famous  through- 
out Christendom  as  "Golden  Rule  Jones."  I  had 
known  of  him  only  as  the  eccentric  mayor  of  our  city, 
and  nearly  everyone  whom  I  had  met  since  my  advent 
in  Toledo  spoke  of  him  only  to  say  something  dis- 
paraging of  him.  The  most  charitable  thing  they 
said  was  that  he  was  crazy.  All  the  newspapers 
were  against  him,  and  all  the  preachers.  My  own 
opinion,  of  course,  could  have  been  of  no  conse- 
quence, but  I  had  learned  in  the  case  of  Altgeld  that 
almost  universal  condemnation  of  a  man  is  to  be 
examined  before  it  is  given  entire  credit.     I  do  not 

112 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

mean  to  say  that  there  was  universal  condemnation 
of  Golden  Rule  Jones  in  Toledo  in  those  days:  it 
was  simply  that  the  institutional  voices  of  society, 
the  press  and  the  pulpit,  were  thundering  in  con- 
demnation of  him.  When  the  people  came  to  vote 
for  his  reelection  his  majorities  were  overwhelming, 
so  that  he  used  to  say  that  everybody  was  against 
him  but  the  people.     But  that  is  another  story. 

In  those  days  I  had  not  met  him.  I  might  have 
called  at  his  office,  to  be  sure,  but  I  did  not  care  to 
add  to  his  burdens.  One  day,  suddenly,  as  I  was 
working  on  a  story  in  my  office,  in  he  stepped  with 
a  startling,  abrupt  manner,  wheeled  a  chair  up  to 
my  desk,  and  sat  down.  He  was  a  big  Welshman 
with  a  sandy  complexion  and  great  hands  that  had 
worked  hard  in  their  time,  and  he  had  an  eye  that 
looked  right  into  the  center  of  your  skull.  He  wore, 
and  all  the  time  he  was  in  the  room  continued  to 
wear,  a  large  cream-colored  slouch  hat,  and  he  had 
on  the  flowing  cravat  which  for  some  inexplicable 
reason  artists  and  social  reformers  wear;  their  affin- 
ity being  due,  no  doubt,  to  the  fact  that  the  reformer 
must  be  an  artist  of  a  sort,  else  he  could  not  dream 
his  dreams.  I  was  relieved,  however,  to  find  that 
Jones  wore  his  hair  clipped  short,  and  there  was 
still  about  him  that  practical  air  of  the  very  prac- 
tical business  man  he  had  been  before  he  became 
mayor.  He  had  been  such  a  practical  business  man 
that  he  was  worth  half  a  million,  a  fairly  good  for- 
tune for  our  town ;  but  he  had  not  been  in  office  very 
long  before  all  the  business  men  were  down  on  him, 
and  saying  that  what  the  town  needed  was  a  busi- 

113 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

ness  man  for  mayor,  a  statement  that  was  destined 
to  ring  in  my  ears  for  a  good  many  years.  They 
disliked  him  of  course  because  he  would  not  do  just 
what  they  told  him  to, — that  being  the  meaning 
and  purpose  of  a  business  man  for  mayor, — but  in- 
sisted that  there  were  certain  other  people  in  the 
city  who  were  entitled  to  some  of  his  service  and 
consideration — namely,  the  working  people  and  the 
poor.  The  politicians  and  the  preachers  objected 
to  him  on  the  same  grounds:  the  unpardonable  sin 
being  to  express  in  any  but  a  purely  ideal  and  sen- 
timental form  sympathy  for  the  workers  or  tlv  7)oor. 
It  seemed  to  be  particularly  exasperating  taat  he 
was  doing  all  this  in  the  name  of  the  Golden  Rule, 
which  was  for  the  Sunday-school;  and  they  even 
went  so  far  as  to  bring  to  town  another  Sam  Jones, 
the  Reverend  Sam  Jones,  to  conduct  a  "revival"  and 
to  defeat  the  Honorable  Sam  Jones.  The  Reverend 
Sam  Jones  had  big  meetings,  and  said  many  clever 
things,  and  many  true  ones,  the  truest  among  them 
being  his  epigram,  "I  am  for  the  Golden  Rule  my- 
self, up  to  a  certain  point,  and  then  I  want  to  take 
the  shotgun  and  the  club."  I  think  that  expression 
marked  the  difference  between  him  and  our  Sam 
Jones,  in  whose  philosophy  there  was  no  place  at 
all  for  the  shotgun  or  the  club.  The  preachers  were 
complaining  that  Mayor  Jones  was  not  using  shot- 
guns, or  at  least  clubs,  on  the  "bad"  people  in  the 
town;  I  suppose  that  since  their  own  persuasions 
had  in  a  measure  failed,  they  felt  that  the  Mayor 
with  such  instruments  might  have  made  the  "bad" 
people  look  as  if  they  had  been  converted  anyway. 

114 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

It  was  when  he  was  undergoing  such  criticism  as 
this  that  he  came  to  see  me,  to  ask  me  to  speak  at 
Golden  Rule  Park.  This  was  a  bit  of  green  grass 
next  to  his  factory;  he  had  dedicated  it  to  the 
people's  use,  and  there  under  a  large  willow-tree, 
on  Sunday  afternoons,  he  used  to  speak  to  hun- 
dreds. There  was  a  little  piano  which  two  men  could 
carry,  and  with  that  on  the  platform  to  play  the 
accompaniments  the  people  used  to  sing  songs  that 
Jones  had  written — some  of  them  of  real  beauty,  and 
breathing  the  spirit  of  poetry,  if  they  were  not  al- 
ways quite  in  its  form.  In  the  winter  these  meet- 
ings were  held  in  Golden  Rule  Hall,  a  large  room 
that  served  very  well  as  an  auditorium,  in  his  fac- 
tory hard  by.  On  the  walls  of  Golden  Rule  Hall 
was  the  original  tin  sign  he  had  hung  up  in  his 
factory  as  the  only  rule  to  be  known  there,  "There- 
fore whatsoever  things  ye  would  that  men  should 
do  to  you,  do  ye  even  so  to  them."  In  the  course 
of  time  every  reformer,  every  radical,  in  the  coun- 
try had  spoken  in  that  hall  or  under  that  willow- 
tree,  and  the  place  developed  an  atmosphere  that  was 
immensely  impressive.  The  hall  had  the  portraits  of 
many  liberal  leaders  and  humanitarians  on  its  walls, 
and  a  number  of  paintings ;  and  in  connection 
with  the  settlement  which  Jones  established  across 
the  street  the  institution  came  to  be,  as  a  reporter 
wrote  one  day  in  his  newspaper,  the  center  of  intelli- 
gence in  Toledo. 

Well  then,  on  that  morning  when  first  he  called, 
Jones  said  to  me: 

"I  want  you  to  come  out  and  speak." 
115 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

"On  what  subject?"  I  asked. 

"There's  only  one  subject,"  he  said, — "life."  And 
his  face  was  radiant  with  a  really  beautiful  smile, 
warmed  with  his  rich  humor.  I  began  to  say  that  I 
would  prepare  something,  but  he  would  not  let  me 
finish  my  sentence. 

"Prepare!"  he  exclaimed.  "Why  prepare?  Just 
speak  what's  in  your  heart." 

Pie  was  always  like  that.  Once,  a  good  while 
after,  in  one  of  his  campaigns,  he  called  me  on  the 
telephone  one  evening  just  at  dinner  time,  and  said: 

"I  want  you  to  go  to  Ironville  and  speak  to- 
night." 

I  was  tired,  and,  as  I  dislike  to  confess,  somewhat 
reluctant, — I  had  always  to  battle  so  for  a  little 
time  to  write, — so  that  I  hesitated,  asked  questions, 
told  him,  as  usual,  that  I  had  no  speech  prepared. 

"But  you  know  it  is  written,"  he  said,  "that  'in 
that  hour  it  shall  be  given  you  what  ye  shall  say.'  " 

I  could  assure  him  that  the  prophecy  had  some- 
what failed  in  my  case,  and  that  what  was  given 
me  to  say  was  not  always  worth  listening  to  when 
it  was  said;  and  then  I  inquired: 

"What  kind  of  crowd  will  be  there?" 

"Oh,  a  good  crowd !"  he  said. 

"But  what  kind  of  people?" 

"What  kind  of  people?"  he  asked  in  a  tone  of 
great  and  genuine  surprise.  "What  kind  of  people? 
Why,  there's  only  one  kind  of  people — just  people, 
just  folks." 

I  went  of  course,  and  I  went  as  well  to  Golden 
Rule  Park  and  to  Golden  Rule  Hall,  and  there  was 

116 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

never  such  a  school  for  public  speaking  as  that 
crowded  park  afforded,  with  street-cars  grinding 
and  scraping  by  one  side  of  it  and  children  laugh- 
ing at  their  play  on  the  swings  and  poles  which 
Jones  had  put  there  for  them;  or  else  standing  be- 
low the  speaker  and  looking  curiously  up  into  his 
face,  and  filling  him  with  the  fear  of  treading  any 
moment  on  their  little  fingers  which,  as  they  clung  to 
the  edge,  made  a  border  all  along  the  front  of  the 
platform.  And  for  a  year  or  so  after  his  death  I 
spoke  there  every  Sunday :  we  were  trying  so  hard  to 
keep  his  great  work  alive. 


XXI 

It  was  our  interest  in  the  disowned,  the  outcast, 
the  poor,  and  the  criminal  that  drew  us  first  to- 
gether; that  and  the  fact  that  we  are  gradually 
assuming  the  same  attitude  toward  life.  He  was  full 
of  Tolstoy  at  that  time,  and  we  could  talk  of  the 
great  Russian,  and  I  could  introduce  him  to  the 
other  great  Russians.  He  was  then  a  little  past 
fifty,  and  had  just  made  the  astounding  discovery 
that  there  was  such  a  thing  as  literature  in  the 
world:  he  had  been  so  busy  working  all  his  life  that 
he  had  never  had  time  to  read,  and  the  whole  world 
of  letters  burst  upon  his  vision  all  suddenly,  and  the 
glorious  prospect  fairly  intoxicated  him,  so  that  he 
stood  like  stout  Cortez,  though  not  so  silent,  upon 
a  peak  in  Darien. 

He  was  reading  Mazzini  also,  and  William  Morris 
117 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

and  Emerson,  who  expressed  his  philosophy  fully,  or 
as  fully  as  one  man  can  express  anything  for  an- 
other, and  it  was  not  long  before  Jones  discovered 
an  unusual  facility  for  expressing  himself,  both  with 
his  voice  and  with  his  pen.  The  letters  he  wrote 
to  the  men  in  his  shops — putting  them  in  their  pay- 
envelopes — are  models  of  simplicity  and  sincerity, 
which  show  a  genuine  culture  and  have  that  beauty 
which  is  the  despair  of  conscious  art.*  He  had  just 
learned  of  Oscar  Wilde's  "Ballad  of  Reading  Gaol," 
and  he  committed  it  to  memory,  or  got  it  into  his 
memory  somehow,  so  that  he  would  recite  stanzas  of 
it  to  anyone.  He  read  Burns,  too,  with  avidity, 
and  I  can  see  him  now  standing  on  the  platform  in 
one  of  his  meetings,  snapping  his  fingers  as  he 
recited : 

A  fig  for  those  by  law  protected ! 

Liberty's  a  glorious  feast! 

But  it  was  Walt  Whitman  whom  he  loved  most, 
and  his  copy  of  "Leaves  of  Grass"  was  underscored 
in  heavy  lines  with  a  red  pencil  until  nearly  every 
striking  passage  in  the  whole  work  had  become  a 
rubric.  When  anything  struck  him,  he  would  have 
to  come  and  tell  me  of  it;  sometimes  he  would  not 
wait,  but  would  call  me  up  on  the  telephone  and 
read  it  to  me.  I  remember  that  occasion  when  his 
voice,  over  the  wire,  said: 

"Listen  to  this  [and  he  read]  : 

*  These  have  been  collected  and  published  under  the  title, 
"Letters  of  Labor  and  Love,"  by  Samuel  M.  Jones,  The  Bobbs- 
Merrill  Co.,  Indianapolis. 

118 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

"The  snag-tooth'd  hostler  with  red  hair,  redeeming  sins 

past  and  to  come, 
Selling  all  he  possesses,  traveling  on  foot  to  fee  lawyers 

for  his  brother  and  sit  by  him  while  he  is  tried  for 

forgery." 

Then  he  laughed,  and  his  chuckle  died  away  on 
the  wire.  That  expressed  him;  that  was  exactly 
what  he  would  have  done  for  a  brother,  exactly  what 
he  did  do  for  many  a  brother,  since  he  regarded  all 
men  as  his  brothers,  and  treated  them  as  such  if 
they  would  let  him.  He  was  always  going  down  to 
the  city  prisons,  or  to  the  workhouses,  and  talking 
to  the  poor  devils  there,  quite  as  if  he  were  one  of 
them,  which  indeed  he  felt  he  was,  and  as  all  of  us 
are,  if  we  only  knew  it.  And  he  was  working  all 
the  time  to  get  them  out  of  prison,  and  finally  he 
and  I  entered  into  a  little  compact  by  which  he  paid 
the  expenses  incident  to  their  trials — the  fees  for 
stenographers  and  that  sort  of  thing — if  I  would 
look  after  their  cases.  Hard  as  the  work  was,  and 
sad  as  it  was,  and  grievously  as  my  law  partners 
complained  of  the  time  it  took,  and  of  its  probable 
effect  on  business  (since  no  one  wished  to  be  known 
as  a  criminal  lawyer!),  it  did  pay  in  the  satisfaction 
there  was  in  doing  a  little  to  comfort  and  console 
— and,  what  was  so  much  more,  to  compel  in  one 
city,  at  least,  a  discussion  of  the  grounds  and  the 
purpose  of  our  institutions.  For  instance,  if  some 
poor  girl  were  arrested,  and  a  jury  trial  were  de- 
manded for  her,  and  her  case  were  given  all  the  care 
and  attention  it  would  have  received  had  she  been 

119 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

some  wealthy  person,  the  police,  when  they  found 
they  could  not  convict,  were  apt  to  be  a  little  more 
careful  of  the  liberties  of  individuals :  they  began  to 
have  a  little  regard  for  human  rights  and  for  hu- 
man life. 

We  completely  broke  up  the  old  practice  of  arrest- 
ing persons  "on  suspicion"  and  holding  them  at  the 
will  and  pleasure  of  the  police  without  any  charge 
having  been  lodged  against  them ;  two  or  three  trials 
before  juries,  the  members  of  which  could  very  easily 
be  made  to  see,  when  it  was  pointed  out  to  them 
a  few  times  in  the  course  of  a  three  days'  trial,  that 
there  is  nothing  more  absurd  than  that  policemen 
should  make  criminals  of  people  merely  by  sus- 
pecting them,  and  sending  them  to  prison  on  that 
sole  account,  wrought  a  change.  It  annoyed  the 
officials  of  course,  because  it  interfered  with  their 
routine.  It  was  no  doubt  exasperating  to  be  com- 
pelled to  stay  in  court  two  or  three  days  and  try 
some  wretch  according  to  the  forms  of  law,  just  as 
if  he  were  somebody  of  importance  and  consequence 
in  the  world,  when  they  would  so  much  rather  have 
been  out  at  the  ball-game,  or  fishing,  or  playing 
pinochle  in  the  guard-room  at  police  headquarters 
with  the  detail  that  had  been  relieved.  Jones  man- 
aged to  get  himself  fined  for  contempt  one  day,  and 
he  immediately  turned  the  incident  to  his  own  ad- 
vantage and  made  his  point  by  drawing  out  his 
check-book  with  a  flourish,  writing  his  check  for 
the  amount  of  his  fine,  and  declaring  that  this 
proved  his  contention  that  the  only  crime  our  civili- 
zation punishes  is  the  crime  of  being  poor. 

120 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

But  he  was  most  in  his  element  when  the  police 
judge  was  absent,  as  he  was  now  and  then.  In 
that  exigency  the  law  gave  Jones,  as  mayor,  the 
power  to  appoint  the  acting  police  judge;  and 
when  Jones  did  not  go  down  and  sit  as  magistrate 
himself,  he  appointed  me;  and  we  always  found  some 
reason  or  other  for  letting  all  the  culprits  go.  The 
foundations  of  society  were  shaken  of  course,  and 
the  editorials  and  sermons  were  heavy  with  all  the 
predictions  of  disaster:  one  might  have  supposed 
that  the  whole  wonderful  and  beautiful  fabric  of 
civilization  which  man  had  been  so  long  in  rearing 
was  to  fall  forever  into  the  awful  abyss  because  a 
few  miserable  outcasts  had  not  been  put  in  prison. 
But  nothing  happened  after  all :  the  poor  miscrables 
were  back  again  in  a  few  days,  and  made  to  resume 
their  hopeless  rounds  through  the  prison  doors ;  but 
the  policemen  of  Toledo  had  their  clubs  taken  away 
from  them,  and  they  became  human,  and  learned 
to  help  people,  and  not  to  hurt  them  if  they  could 
avoid  it;  and  that  police  judge  who  once  fined  Jones 
became  in  time  one  of  the  leaders  in  our  city  of  the 
new  social  movement  that  has  marked  the  last  dec- 
ade in  America. 

I  learned  to  know  a  good  many  people  in  that 
underworld,  many  of  whom  were  professed  criminals, 
and  there  were  some  remarkable  characters  among 
them.  I  learned  that,  just  as  Jones  had  said,  they 
were  all  people,  just  folks,  and  that  they  had  so 
much  more  good  than  bad  in  them,  that  if  some 
way  could  be  devised  whereby  they  might  have  a 
little  better  opportunity  to  develop  the  good,  there 

121 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

was  hope  for  all  of  them.  Of  course,  in  any  effort 
to  help  them, — and  our  efforts  were  not  always 
perhaps  wholly  wise, — we  encountered  that  most 
formidable  and  fundamental  obstacle  to  prison  re- 
form, the  desire  in  the  human  breast  for  revenge, 
the  savage  hatred  which  is  perhaps  some  obscure 
instinct  of  protection  against  the  anti-social  mem- 
bers of  society:  it  stands  forever  in  the  way  of  all 
prison  reform,  and  of  ameliorations  of  the  lot  of 
the  poor.  It  is  that  which  keeps  the  barbarity  of 
capital  punishment  alive  in  the  world;  it  is  that 
which  makes  every  prison  in  the  land  a  hell,  where 
from  time  to  time  the  most  revolting  atrocities  are 
practiced.  Out  of  those  experiences,  out  of  the  con- 
templation of  the  misery,  the  pathos,  the  hopeless- 
ness of  the  condition  of  those  victims,  I  wrote  "The 
Turn  of  the  Balance."  I  was  very  careful  of  my 
facts ;  I  was  purposely  conservative,  and,  forgetting 
the  advice  of  Goethe,  softened  things  down;  as  for 
instance,  where  I  had  known  of  cases  in  which  pris- 
oners had  been  hung  up  in  the  bull-rings  for  thirty 
days, — being  lowered  to  the  floor  each  night  of 
course, — I  put  it  down  as  eight  days,  and  so  on. 
And  the  wise  and  virtuous  judges  and  the  preachers 
and  the  respectable  people  all  said  it  was  untrue, 
that  such  things  could  not  be.  Since  then  there 
have  been  investigations  of  prisons  in  most  of  the 
states,  with  revelations  of  conditions  far  worse  than 
any  I  tried  to  portray.  And  such  things  have  gone 
on,  and  are  going  on  to-day ;  but  nobody  cares. 


122 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 


XXII 

And  yet  somebody  after  all  did  care  about  all 
those  miserable  souls  who  are  immured  in  the  terri- 
ble prisons  which  society  maintains  as  monuments 
to  the  strange  and  implacable  hatred  in  the  breast 
of  mankind;  perhaps,  in  the  last  chapter  of  these 
vagrant  memories,  I  allowed  to  creep  into  my  utter- 
ance some  of  the  old  bitterness  which  now  and  then 
would  taint  our  efforts,  do  what  we  might.  And 
that  is  not  at  all  the  note  I  would  adopt,  though 
it  used  at  times  to  be  very  difficult  not  to  do  so; 
one  cannot,  day  after  day,  beat  against  the  old  and 
solid  and  impregnable  wall  of  human  institutions 
without  becoming  sore  and  sick  in  one's  soul. 

And  there  is  no  institution  which  society  so  cher- 
ishes as  she  does  her  penal  institutions,  and  most 
sacrosanct  of  these  are  the  ax,  the  guillotine,  the 
garrote,  the  gibbet,  the  electric  chair.  We  tried 
at  each  session  of  the  legislature  to  secure  the  pas- 
sage of  a  bill  abolishing  capital  punishment,  but 
the  good  people,  those  who  felt  that  they  held  in 
their  keeping  the  morals  of  the  state,  always  op- 
posed it  and  defeated  it.  Beloved  and  sacred  insti- 
tution! No  wonder  the  ship-wrecked  sailor,  cast 
upon  an  unknown  shore,  on  looking  up  and  behold- 
ing a  gallows,  fell  on  his  knees  and  said:  "Thank 
God,  I'm  in  a  Christian  land!" 

Travelers  visit  prisons  and  places  of  execution, 
those  historic  spots  where  humanity  made  red  blots 
on  its  pathway  in  the  notion  that  it  was  doing  jus- 

123 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

tice,  and  always  they  sigh  and  shake  their  heads, 
beholding  in  those  events  only  a  supreme  folly  and 
a  supreme  cruelty. 

All  the  executions,  all  the  imprisonments  of  the 
past  are  seen  to  have  been  mistakes  made  by  sav- 
ages ;  there  is  not  one  for  which  to-day  a  word  is 
uttered  in  excuse.  All  the  Golgothas  of  the  world 
have  become  Calvaries,  where  men  go  in  pity  and  in 
tears  in  the  hope  that  their  regret  may  somehow 
work  a  retroactive  expiation  of  the  guilt  of  their 
cruel  ancestors — and  they  rise  from  their  knees  and 
go  forth  and  acquiesce  in  brutalities  that  are  to- 
day different  only  in  the  slightest  of  degrees  from 
those  they  bemoan. 

And  so  all  the  other  executions  of  death  sentences, 
on  subjects  less  distinguished,  with  no  glimmer  of 
the  halo  of  romance,  no  meed  of  martyrdom  to  il- 
lumine them,  are  seen  to  have  been  huge  and  gro- 
tesque mistakes  of  a  humanity  that  at  times  gives 
itself  over  to  the  elemental  savage  lust  of  the  blood 
of  its  fellows. 

I  do  not  say,  of  course,  that  there  was  any  sim- 
ilarity between  the  offenses  of  those  whom  Jones 
and  I  were  concerned  about  in  those  days  and  those 
striking  figures  who  illustrate  the  history  of  the 
world  and  mark  the  slow  spiral  path  of  the  progress 
of  mankind;  these  were  the  commonest  of  common 
criminals,  poor,  mistaken,  misshapen  beings,  some- 
how marred  in  the  making. 

It  was  my  lot  to  defend  a  number  of  those  who 
had  committed  murders,  some  of  them  murders  so 


124 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

foul  that  there  was  nothing  to  say  in  their  behalf. 
All  one  could  say  was  in  behalf  of  those  whom  one 
would  save  from  committing  another  murder.  But 
when  you  have  come  to  know  even  a  murderer,  when 
day  after  day  you  have  visited  him  in  his  cell,  and 
have  talked  with  him,  and  have  seen  him  laugh  and 
cry,  and  have  had  him  tell  you  about  his  family,  and 
that  amazing  complexity  which  he  calls  his  life,  when 
gradually  you  come  to  know  him,  no  matter  how 
undeserving  he  may  be  in  the  abstract,  he  under- 
goes a  strange  and  subtle  metamorphosis ;  slowly 
and  gradually,  without  your  being  aware,  he  ceases 
to  be  a  murderer,  and  becomes  a  human  being,  very 
much  like  all  those  about  you.  Thus,  there  is  no 
such  thing  as  a  human  being  in  the  abstract;  they 
are  all  thoroughly  and  essentially  concrete. 

I  have  wandered  far  in  these  speculations,,  but  I 
hope  I  have  not  wandered  too  far  to  make  it  clear 
that  Jones's  point  of  view  was  always  and  invaria- 
bly the  human  point  of  view;  he  knew  no  such  thing 
as  murderers,  or  even  criminals,  or  "good"  people, 
or  "bad"  people,  they  were  all  to  him  men  and,  in- 
deed, brothers.  And  if  society  did  not  care  about 
them,  except  in  its  desire  to  make  way  with  them, 
Jones  did  care,  and  there  were  others  who  cared; 
the  poor  cared,  the  working  people  cared, — though 
they  might  themselves  at  times  give  way  to  the 
same  elemental  social  rage, — they  always  endorsed 
Jones's  leniency  whenever  they  had  the  opportunity. 
They  had  this  opportunity  at  the  polls  every  two 
years,  and  they  never  failed  him. 

125 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

They  did  not  fail  him  even  in  that  last  campaign 
of  his,  though  every  means  known  to  man  was  tried 
to  win  them  away  from  their  peculiar  allegiance. 
It  was  a  strange  campaign;  I  suppose  there  was 
never  another  like  it  in  America.  As  I  think  of  it 
there  come  back  the  recollections  of  those  raw  spring 
nights ;  we  held  our  municipal  elections  in  the  spring 
in  those  days,  that  is,  spring  as  we  know  it  in  the 
region  of  the  Great  Lakes.  It  is  not  so  much  spring 
as  it  is  a  final  summing-up  and  recapitulation  of 
winter,  a  coda  to  a  monstrous  meteorological  con- 
certo as  doleful  as  the  allegro  lamentoso  of  Tschai- 
kovsky's  "Sixth  Symphony."  There  is  nowhere  in 
the  world,  so  far  as  I  know,  or  care  to  know,  such  an 
abominable  manifestation  of  the  meanness  of  nature ; 
it  is  meaner  than  the  meanness  of  human  nature, 
entailing  a  constant  struggle  with  winds,  a  perpetual 
bending  to  gusts  of  snow  that  is  rain,  or  a  rain 
that  is  hail,  with  an  east  wind  that  blows  persistently 
off  Lake  Erie  for  two  months,  with  little  stinging 
barbs  of  ice  on  its  breath — and  then,  suddenly,  it  is 
summer  without  any  gentle  airs  at  all  to  introduce 
its  heat. 

Jones  was  not  very  well  that  spring;  and  his 
throaty  ailment  was  the  very  one  that  should  have 
been  spared  such  dreadful  exposures  as  he  was  sub- 
jected to  in  that  campaign.  It  was  in  the  days  be- 
fore motor  cars,  and  he  and  I  drove  about  every 
night  from  one  meeting  to  another  in  a  little  buggy 
he  had,  drawn  by  an  old  white  mare  named  Molly, 
whose  shedding  of  her  coat  was  the  only  vernal  sign 
to  be  detected  anywhere.     But  Jones  was  so  full 

126 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

of  humor  that  he  laughed  at  nearly  everything — 
even  his  enemies,  whom  he  never  would  call  enemies. 
I  can  see  him  now — climbing  down  out  of  the  buggy, 
carefully  blanketing  old  Molly  against  the  raw 
blasts,  then  brushing  the  white  hairs  from  his  front 
with  his  enormous  hands,  and  running  like  a  boy  up 
the  stairway  to  the  dim  little  hall  in  the  Polish 
quarter  where  the  crowd  had  gathered.  The  men 
set  up  a  shout  when  they  saw  him,  and  he  leaped 
on  the  stage  and,  without  waiting  for  the  chairman 
to  introduce  him, — he  scorned  every  convention  that 
obtruded  itself, — he  leaned  over  the  front  of  the 
platform  and  said: 

"What  is  the  Polish  word  for  liberty?" 

The  crowd  of  Poles,  huddling  about  a  stove  in 
the  middle  of  the  hall,  their  caps  on,  their  pipes 
going  furiously,  their  bodies  covered  with  the 
strange  garments  they  had  brought  with  them  across 
the  sea,  shouted  in  reply. 

"WolnoscT 

And  Jones  paused  and  listened,  cocked  his  head, 
wrinkled  his  brows,  and  said: 

"What  was  that?     Say  it  again!" 

Again  they  shouted  it. 

"Say  it  again — once  more!"  he  demanded.  And 
again  they  shouted  it  in  a  splendid  chorus.  And 
then 

"Well,"  said  Golden  Rule  Jones,  "I  can't  pro- 
nounce it,  but  it  sounds  good,  and  that  is  what  we 
are  after  in  this  campaign." 

Now  that  I  have  written  it  down,  I  have  a  feeling 
that  I  have  utterly  failed  to  give  an  adequate  sense 

127 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

of  the  entire  spontaneity  and  simplicity  with  which 
this  was  done.  It  was,  of  course,  tremendously  ef- 
fective as  a  bit  of  campaigning,  but  only  because  it 
was  so  wholly  sincere.  Five  minutes  later  he  was 
hotly  debating  with  a  working  man  who  had  inter- 
rupted him  to  accuse  him  of  being  unfair  to  union 
labor  in  his  shops,  and  there  was  no  coddling,  no 
truckling,  no  effort  to  win  or  to  please  on  his  part, 
though  he  would  take  boundlessly  patient  pains  to 
explain  to  anyone  who  really  wanted  to  know  any- 
thing about  him  or  his  official  acts. 

He  was  natural,  simple  and  unspoiled,  as  naive  as 
a  child,  and  "except  ye  become  as  little  children 
ye  cannot  enter  the  kingdom  of  heaven."  He  fully 
realized  that  the  kingdom  of  heaven  is  within  one's 
self;  he  was  not  looking  for  it,  or  expecting  it  any- 
where outside  of  himself,  certainly  he  was  not  ex- 
pecting it  in  a  political  campaign,  or  in  the  mere 
process  of  being  elected  to  an  office.  He  regarded 
his  office,  indeed,  only  as  an  opportunity  to  serve, 
and  he  had  been  in  that  office  long  enough  to  have 
lost  any  illusions  he  may  ever  have  had  concerning 
it;  one  term  will  suffice  to  teach  a  man  that  lesson, 
even  though  he  seek  the  office  again. 

He  was  like  an  evangelist,  in  a  way,  and  his  meet- 
ings were  in  the  broad  sense  religious,  though  he 
had  long  since  left  his  church,  not  because  its  min- 
isters were  always  condemning  him,  but  for  the  same 
reasons  that  Tolstoy  left  his  church.  His  evangel 
was  that  of  liberty.  He  had  written  a  number  of 
little  songs.  One  of  them,  set  to  the  tune  of  an  old 
hymn  he  had  heard  in  Wales  as  a  boy,  had  a  noble 

128 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

effect  when  the  crowd  sang  it.  It  was  the  Gad  im 
Deimle.  His  wife,  who  is  an  accomplished  musician, 
had  transposed  its  minors  into  majors,  and  in  its 
strains,  as  they  were  sung  by  the  men  in  his  shops, 
— and  there  was  singing  for  you! — or  by  the  people 
in  his  political  meetings,  there  was  all  the  Welsh 
love  of  music,  all  the  Welsh  love  of  liberty,  and  a 
high  and  pure  emotion  in  the  chorus: 

Ever  growing,  swiftly  flowing, 
Like  a  mighty  river 
Sweeping  on  from  shore  to  shore, 
Love  will  rule  this  wide  world  o'er. 

It  was  his  Welsh  blood,  this  Celtic  strain  in  him, 
that  accounted  for  much  that  was  in  his  tempera- 
ment, his  wit,  his  humor,  his  instinctive  appreciation 
of  art,  his  contempt  for  artificial  distinctions,  his 
love  of  liberty,  his  passionate  democracy.  Sitting 
one  evening  not  long  ago  in  the  visitor's  gallery  of 
the  House  of  Commons  I  saw  the  great  Welsh  rad- 
ical, David  Lloyd  George,  saw  him  enter  and  take  his 
seat  on  the  government  bench.  And  as  I  looked  at 
him  I  was  impressed  by  his  resemblance  to  some  one  I 
had  known;  there  was  a  strange,  haunting  likeness, 
not  in  any  physical  characteristic,  though  there 
was  the  same  Welsh  ruddiness,  and  the  hair  was 
something  like — but  when  Mr.  Lloyd  George  turned 
and  whispered  to  the  prime  minister  and  smiled  I 
started,  and  said  to  myself:  "It  is  Jones!" 


129 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 


XXIII 

There  was  something  pathetic  in  that  last  cam- 
paign, the  pathos,  perhaps,  of  the  last  phase.  The 
long  years  of  opposition  had  begun  to  tell :  there  was 
a  strong  determination  to  defeat  him.  He  had  not 
wished  to  stand  again  for  the  office,  but,  after  the 
Toledo  custom,  there  had  been  presented  to  him  an 
informal  petition,  signed  by  several  thousand  citi- 
zens, asking  him  to  do  so,  and  he  had  consented. 
But  when  he  wrote  a  statement  setting  forth  his  posi- 
tion— it  was  a  document  with  the  strong  flavor  of  his 
personality  in  it — the  newspapers  refused  to  publish 
it ;  some  of  them  would  not  publish  it  even  as  adver- 
tising, and  he  opened  his  campaign  on  the  post  office 
corner,  standing  bare-headed  in  the  March  wind,  his 
son  Paul  blowing  a  saxophone  to  attract  a  crowd. 
Many  of  his  old  supporters  were  falling  away;  it 
seemed  for  a  time  that  he  alone  would  have  to  make 
the  campaign  without  any  to  speak  for  him  on  the 
stump ;  far  otherwise  than  in  that  second  campaign, 
when,  after  having  been  counted  out  in  the  Repub- 
lican convention,  he  had  run  for  the  first  time  inde- 
pendently, a  "Man  Without  a  Party,"  as  he  called 
himself;  and  thousands,  themselves  outraged  by  the 
treatment  his  own  party  had  accorded  him,  in  the 
spirit  of  fair  play  had  rallied  to  his  standard. 

But  now  things  had  changed,  and  an  incident 
which  occurred  at  the  beginning  of  this  campaign 
was  significant  of  the  feeling  toward  him,  though  in 
all  kindness  it  must  not  be  told  in  detail.     There 

130 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

was  a  prominent  man  in  town  who  had  publicly  re- 
viled him  and  criticized  him  and  persecuted  him,  who 
had  done  that  which  cut  him  more  deeply  than  all 
else,  that  is,  he  had  impugned  his  motives  and  ques- 
tioned his  sincerity.  In  some  human  hunger  for  un- 
derstanding, I  suppose,  Jones  went  to  this  man 
with  his  written  statement  of  his  position  and  asked 
him  to  read  it,  merely  to  read  it.  The  fellow's  an- 
swer was  to  snatch  the  paper  from  Jones's  hand 
and  tear  it  up  in  his  face.  It  is  easy  to  imagine 
what  a  man  ordinarily  would  do  in  the  face  of  such 
an  amazing  insult ;  surely,  if  ever,  the  time  had  come 
for  the  "shotgun  and  the  club."  Mayor  Jones  was 
large  and  powerful,  he  had  been  reared  in  the  oil 
fields,  where  blows  are  quick  as  tempers ;  he  was  ath- 
letic, always  in  training,  for  he  took  constant  physi- 
cal exercise  (one  of  the  counts  against  him,  indeed, 
was  that  he  slept  out  of  doors  on  the  roof  of  his 
back  porch,  a  bit  of  radicalism  in  those  days,  grown 
perfectly  orthodox  in  these  progressive  times),  and 
he  was  a  Celt,  naturally  quick  to  resent  insult,  of 
a  temperament  prompt  to  take  fire.  But  he  turned 
away  from  the  fellow,  without  a  word. 

He  came  to  my  office  immediately  afterward,  and 
I  saw  that  he  was  trying  hard  to  master  some  un- 
usual emotion.  I  shall  never  forget  him  as  he  sat 
there,  telling  me  of  his  experience.  After  a  little 
while  his  face  broke  into  that  beautiful  smile  of 
his,  more  beautiful  than  I  had  ever  seen  it,  and  he 
said: 

"Well,  I've  won  the  greatest  victory  of  my  life; 
I  have  won  at  last  a  victory  over  myself,  over  my 

131 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

own  nature.  I  have  done  what  it  has  always  been 
hardest  for  me  to  do." 

"What?"  I  asked. 

He  sat  in  silence  for  a  moment,  and  then  he  said: 

"You  know,  it  has  always  seemed  to  me  that  the 
most  remarkable  thing  that  was  ever  said  of  Jesus 
was  that  when  he  was  reviled,  he  reviled  not  again. 
It  is  the  hardest  thing  in  the  world  to  do." 

The  struggle  over  the  renewal  of  the  franchise 
grants  to  the  street  railway  company  had  already 
begun,  and  the  council  had  attempted  to  grant  it  the 
franchise  it  wished,  renewing  its  privileges  for  an- 
other twenty-five  years.  When  Mayor  Jones  vetoed 
the  bill,  the  council  prepared  to  pass  it  over  his 
veto,  and  would  have  done  so  that  Monday  night 
had  it  not  been  for  two  men — Mayor  Jones  and  Mr. 
Negley  D.  Cochran,  the  editor  of  the  News-Bee, 
a  newspaper  which  has  always  taken  the  democratic 
viewpoint  of  public  questions.  Mr.  Cochran,  with 
his  brilliant  gift  in  the  writing  of  editorials,  had 
called  out  the  whole  populace,  almost,  to  attend  the 
meeting  of  the  council  and  to  protest.  The  demon- 
stration was  so  far  effective  that  the  council  was 
too  frightened  to  pass  the  street  railway  ordinance. 
The  attorney  for  the  street  railway  company  was 
there,  and  when  there  was  a  lull  in  the  noise,  he 
sneered : 

"I  suppose,  Mr.  Mayor,  that  this  is  an  example 
of  government  under  the  Golden  Rule." 

"No,"  replied  Jones  in  a  flash,  "it  is  an  example 
of  government  under  the  rule  of  gold." 

Unless  it  were  because  of  his  interference  with  the 
132 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

nefarious  privileges  of  a  few,  one  can  see  no  reason 
why  the  press  and  pulpit  should  have  opposed  him. 
What  had  he  done?  He  had  only  preached  that 
the  fundamental  doctrine  of  Christianity  was  sound, 
and,  as  much  as  a  man  may  in  so  complex  a  civili- 
zation, he  had  tried  to  practice  it.  He  had  taught 
kindness  and  tolerance,  and  pity  and  mercy;  he  had 
visited  the  sick,  and  gone  to  those  that  were  in 
prison;  he  had  said  that  all  men  are  free  and  equal, 
that  they  have  been  endowed  by  their  Creator  with 
certain  inalienable  rights.  He  had  said  that  it  is 
wrong  to  kill  people,  even  in  the  electric  chair,  that 
it  is  wrong  to  take  from  the  poor,  without  giving 
them  in  return.  He  had  not  said  these  things  in 
anger,  or  in  bitterness ;  he  had  never  been  personal, 
he  had  always  been  explicit  in  saying  that  he,  as  a 
part  of  society,  was  equally  to  blame  with  all  the 
rest  for  social  wrongs.  The  only  textbooks  he  ever 
used  in  his  campaigns  were  the  New  Testament,  the 
Declaration  of  Independence,  and,  of  course,  his  be- 
loved Walt  Whitman.  And  yet  the  pulpits  rang 
every  Sunday  with  denunciations  of  him,  and  the 
newspapers  opposed  him.  Why  was  it,  because  a 
man  endorsed  these  old  doctrines  upon  which  so- 
ciety claims  to  rest,  that  society  should  denounce 
him? 

I  think  it  was  because  he  was  so  utterly  and  en- 
tirely sincere,  and  because  he  believed  these  things, 
and  tried  to  put  them  into  practice  in  his  life,  and 
wished  them  to  be  more  fully  incorporated  in  the 
life  of  society.  Society  will  forgive  anything  in  a 
man,  except  sincerity.     If  he  be  sincere  in  charity, 

133 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

in  pity,  in  mercy,  in  sympathy  for  the  outcast,  the 
despised,  the  imprisoned,  all  that  vast  horde  of  the 
denied  and  proscribed,  still  less  will  it  forgive  him, 
for  it  knows  instinctively  that  the  privileges  men 
have  or  seek  could  not  exist  in  a  system  where 
these  principles  were  admitted  as  vital,  inspiring 
forces. 

There  was  nothing,  of  course,  for  one  who  be- 
lieved in  the  American  doctrines  to  do  but  to  support 
such  a  man,  and  when  he  appeared  to  be  so  utterly 
without  supporters  it  seemed  to  be  one's  duty  more 
than  ever,  though  I  own  to  having  shrunk  from  such 
unconventional  methods  as  Jones  employed.  That 
meeting  at  the  post-office  corner,  for  instance ;  some- 
one might  laugh,  and  in  the  great  American  self- 
consciousness  and  fear  of  the  ridiculous,  what  was 
one  to  do?  The  opposition,  that  is,  the  two  old 
parties,  the  Republican  and  Democratic,  had  nomi- 
nated excellent  men  against  Jones ;  the  Republican 
nominee,  indeed,  Mr.  John  W.  Dowd,  was  a  man 
to  whom  I  had  gone  to  school,  an  old  and  very  dear 
friend  of  our  family,  a  charming  gentleman  of  cul- 
tivated tastes.  It  was  not  easy  to  be  in  the  attitude 
of  opposing  him,  but  my  duty  seemed  clear,  and  I 
went  into  the  campaign  with  Jones,  and  we  spoke 
together  every  night. 

It  was  a  campaign  in  which  were  discussed  most 
of  the  fundamental  problems  of  social  life.  A 
stranger,  coming  to  Toledo  at  that  time,  might  have 
thought  us  a  most  unsophisticated  people,  for  there 
were  speculations  about  the  right  of  society  to  in- 
flict punishment,  the  basis  of  property,  and  a  rather 

134 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

searching  inquiry  into  the  subject  of  representative 
government.  This  was  involved  in  the  dispute  as  to 
the  propriety  of  political  machines,  for  the  Republi- 
cans by  that  time  had  a  party  organization  so  strong 
that  it  was  easily  denominated  a  machine;  it  was  so 
strong  that  it  controlled  every  branch  of  the  city 
government  except  the  executive;  it  never  could  de- 
feat Jones.  There  was  a  good  deal  said,  too,  about 
the  enforcement  of  law,  a  subject  which  has  its  fasci- 
nation for  the  people  of  my  town. 


XXIV 

Besides  these  interesting  topics  there  was  the  sub- 
ject of  municipal  home  rule.  This  had  already  be- 
come vital  in  Toledo  because,  a  year  or  so  before, 
the  Republican  party  organization  through  its  in- 
fluence in  the  state,  without  having  to  strain  its 
powers  of  persuasion,  had  induced  the  legislature 
to  pass  a  special  law  which  deprived  the  Mayor  of 
Toledo  of  his  control  of  the  police  force  and  vested 
the  government  of  that  body  in  a  commission  ap- 
pointed by  the  governor  of  the  state. 

It  had  been,  of  course,  a  direct  offense  to  Jones, 
and  it  was  intended  to  take  from  him  the  last  of  his 
powers.  He  had  been  greatly  roused  by  it;  the 
morning  after  the  law  had  been  enacted  he  had 
appeared  at  my  house  before  breakfast  to  discuss 
this  latest  assault  upon  liberty.  The  law  was  an 
exact  replica  of  a  law  that  had  been  passed  for  Cin- 
cinnati many  years  before,  and  that  law  had  been 

135 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

sustained  by  the  Supreme  Court  in  a  decision  which 
had  made  it  the  leading  case  on  that  subject  of  con- 
stitutional law  for  a  whole  generation.  Time  and 
again  it  had  been  attacked  and  always  it  had  been 
sustained;  to  contest  the  constitutionality  of  this 
new  act  seemed  the  veriest  folly. 

But  Jones  was  determined  to  resist;  like  some 
stout  burgomaster  of  an  old  free  city  of  Germany 
he  determined  to  stand  out  against  the  city's  over- 
lords from  the  rural  districts,  and  he  insisted  on  my 
representing  him  in  the  litigation  which  his  resist- 
ance would  certainly  provoke.  I  had  no  hope  of 
winning,  and  told  him  so;  I  explained  the  precedent 
in  the  Cincinnati  case,  and  that  only  made  him  more 
determined;  if  there  was  one  thing  more  than  an- 
other for  which  he  had  a  supreme  and  sovereign 
contempt  it  was  a  legal  precedent.  My  brethren  at 
the  bar  all  laughed  at  me,  as  I  knew  they  would ;  but 
I  went  to  work,  and  after  a  few  days'  investigation 
became  convinced  that  the  doctrine  laid  down  in 
that  leading  case  was  not  at  all  sound. 

When  I  came  to  this  conviction,  I  induced  Jones 
to  retain  additional  counsel,  one  of  the  most  brilliant 
lawyers  at  our  bar,  Mr.  Clarence  Brown,  a  man 
who,  in  addition  to  his  knowledge  of  the  law,  could 
bring  to  the  forum  a  charming  personality,  a  wit  and 
an  eloquence  that  were  irresistible.  He,  too,  set  to 
work,  and  in  a  few  days  he  was  convinced,  as  I,  that 
the  precedent  should  be  overthrown.  Jones  refused 
to  turn  over  the  command  of  the  police  to  the  new 
commissioners  whom  the  governor  appointed;  they 
applied  to  the  Supreme  Court  for  a  writ  of  manda- 

136 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

mus,  we  tried  the  case,  and  we  won,  overthrowing 
not  only  the  doctrine  of  the  Cincinnati  case,  but  the 
whole  fabric  of  municipal  legislation  in  the  state,  so 
that  a  special  session  of  the  legislature  was  neces- 
sary to  enact  new  codes  for  the  government  of  the 
cities. 

Our  satisfaction  and  our  pride  in  our  legal 
achievement  was  somewhat  modified  by  the  fact  that 
the  application  of  the  same  rule  to  conditions  in 
our  sister  city  of  Cleveland  had  the  effect,  in  cer- 
tain cases  then  pending,  of  pulling  down  the  work 
which  another  great  mayor,  Tom  L.  Johnson,  was 
then  doing  in  that  city.  It  was  even  said  that  the 
Supreme  Court  had  been  influenced  by  the  desire  of 
Mark  Hanna,  Tom  Johnson's  ancient  enemy  in 
Cleveland,  to  see  his  old  rival  defeated.  Some  were 
unkind  enough  to  say  that  Mark  Hanna's  influence 
was  more  powerful  with  the  court,  as  at  that  time 
constituted,  than  was  the  logic  of  the  attorneys 
who  were  representing  Golden  Rule  Jones. 

But  however  that  may  have  been,  the  decision  in 
that  case  had  ultimate  far-reaching  effects  in  im- 
proving the  conditions  in  Ohio  cities,  and  was  the 
beginning  of  a  conflict  that  did  not  end  until  they 
were  free  and  autonomous.  In  my  own  case  it  was 
the  beginning  of  a  study  of  municipal  government 
that  has  grown  more  fascinating  as  the  years  have 
fled,  a  study  that  has  led  me  to  see,  or  to  think  that 
I  see,  the  large  hope  of  our  democracy  in  the  cities  of 
America. 

I  regard  it  as  Jones's  supreme  contribution  to 
the  thought  of  his  time  that,  by  the  mere  force  of 

137 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

his  own  original  character  and  personality,  he  com- 
pelled a  discussion  of  fundamental  principles  of  gov- 
ernment. Toledo  to-day  is  a  community  which  has 
a  wider  acquaintance  with  all  the  abstract  principles 
of  social  relations  than  any  other  city  in  the  land, 
or  in  the  world,  since,  when  one  ventures  into  gen- 
eralities, one  might  as  well  make  them  as  sweeping 
as  one  can. 

Jones's  other  great  contribution  to  the  science  of 
municipal  government  was  that  of  non-partizanship 
in  local  affairs.  That  is  the  way  he  used  to  express 
it;  what  he  meant  was  that  the  issues  of  national 
politics  must  not  be  permitted  to  obtrude  themselves 
into  municipal  campaigns,  and  that  what  divisions 
there  are  should  be  confined  to  local  issues.  There 
is,  of  course,  in  our  cities,  as  in  our  land  or  any 
land,  only  one  issue,  that  which  is  presented  by  the 
conflict  of  the  aristocratic,  or  plutocratic,  spirit  and 
the  spirit  of  democracy. 

Jones  used  to  herald  himself  as  "a  Man  Without 
a  Party,"  but  he  was  a  great  democrat,  the  most 
fundamental  I  ever  knew  or  imagined;  he  summed 
up  in  himself,  as  no  other  figure  of  our  time  since 
Lincoln,  all  that  the  democratic  spirit  is  and  hopes 
to  be.  Perhaps  in  this  characterization  I  seem  to 
behold  his  figure  larger  than  it  was  in  relation  to  the 
whole  mass,  but  while  his  work  may  appear  at  first 
glance  local,  it  was  really  general  and  universal.  No 
one  can  estimate  the  peculiar  and  lively  force  of  such 
a  personality ;  certainly  no  one  can  presume  to  limit 
his  influence,  for  such  a  spirit  is  illimitable  and 
irresistible. 

138 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

He  was  elected  in  that  last  campaign  for  the 
fourth  time,  but  he  did  not  live  very  long.  He  had 
never,  it  seemed  to  me,  been  quite  the  same  after  the 
day  when  he  had  that  experience  of  insult  which 
he  did  not  resent.  "Draw  the  sting,"  he  used  to 
counsel  us  when,  in  our  campaign  harangues,  we  be- 
came bitter,  or  sarcastic,  or  merely  smart.  He  had 
supreme  reliance  on  the  simple  truth,  on  the  power 
of  reasonableness.  He  never  reviled  again ;  he  never 
sought  to  even  scores.  When  he  died  the  only 
wounds  he  left  in  human  hearts  were  because  he  was 
no  more.  They  understood  him  at  last,  those  who 
had  scoffed  and  sneered  and  abused  and  vilified,  and 
I,  who  had  had  the  immense  privilege  of  his  friend- 
ship, and  thought  I  knew  him, — when  I  stood  that 
July  afternoon,  on  the  veranda  of  his  home,  beside 
his  bier  to  speak  at  his  funeral,  and  looked  out  over 
the  thousands  who  were  gathered  on  the  wide  lawn 
before  his  home, — I  realized  that  I,  too,  had  not 
wholly  understood  him. 

I  know  not  how  many  thousands  were  there;  they 
were  standing  on  the  lawns  in  a  mass  that  extended 
across  the  street  and  into  the  yards  on  the  farther 
side.  Down  to  the  corner,  and  into  the  side  streets, 
they  were  packed,  and  they  stood  in  long  lines  all  the 
way  out  to  the  cemetery.  In  that  crowd  there  were 
all  sorts  of  that  one  sort  he  knew  as  humanity  with- 
out distinction, — judges,  and  women  of  prominence 
and  women  whom  he  alone  would  have  included  in 
humanity,  there  were  thieves,  and  prize-fighters, — 
and  they  all  stood  there  with  the  tears  streaming 
down  their  faces. 

139 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

There  is  no  monument  to  Golden  Rule  Jones  in 
Toledo;  and  since  St.  Gaudens  is  gone  I  know  of  no 
one  who  could  conceive  him  in  marble  or  in  bronze. 
There  is  not  a  public  building  which  he  erected,  no 
reminder  of  him  which  the  eye  can  see  or  the  hands 
touch.  But  his  name  is  spoken  here  a  thousand 
times  a  day,  and  always  with  the  reverence  that 
marks  the  passage  of  a  great  man  upon  the  earth. 
And  I  am  sure  that  his  influence  did  not  end  here. 
Did  not  a  letter  come  from  Yasnaya  Polyana  in 
the  handwriting  of  the  great  Tolstoy,  who  somehow 
had  heard  of  this  noble  and  simple  soul  who  was,  in 
his  own  way,  trying  the  same  experiment  of  life 
which  the  great  Russian  was  making? 


XXV 

In  the  beginning,  of  course,  it  was  inevitable  that 
Jones  should  have  been  called  a  Socialist.  I  suppose 
he  did  not  care  much  himself,  but  the  Socialists 
cared,  and  promptly  disowned  him,  and  were  at  one 
with  the  capitalists  in  their  hatred  and  abuse  of 
him.  He  shared,  no  doubt,  the  Socialists'  great 
dream  of  an  ordered  society,  though  he  would  not 
have  ordered  it  by  any  kind  of  force  or  compulsion, 
but  in  that  spirit  which  they  sneer  at  as  mere  senti- 
mentalism.  He  was  patient  with  them;  he  saw  their 
point  of  view ;  he  had,  indeed,  the  immense  advan- 
tage of  being  in  advance  of  them  in  his  development. 
He  saw  Socialism  not,  as  most  see  it,  from  the  hither 
side,  but  from  the  farther  side,  as  one  who  has  passed 

140 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

through  it;  he  was  like  a  man  who  having  left  the 
dusty  highway  and  entered  a  wood  which  he  thinks 
his  journey's  end,  suddenly  emerges  and  from  a  hill 
beholds  the  illimitable  prospect  that  lies  beyond.  Of 
course  he  could  never  endure  anything  so  doctrin- 
aire as  Socialism,  in  the  form  in  which  he  was  accus- 
tomed to  see  it  exemplified  in  the  Socialists  about 
him.  He  could  not  endure  their  orthodoxy,  any  more 
than  he  could  endure  the  orthodoxy  they  were  con- 
tending against.  Their  sectarianism  was  to  him 
quite  as  impossible  as  that  sectarianism  he  had  known 
in  other  fields.  Their  bigotry  was  as  bad  as  any.  He 
saw  no  good  to  come  from  a  substitution  of  their 
tyranny  for  any  other  of  the  many  old  tyrannies  in 
the  world.  And  naturally  to  one  of  his  spirit  the 
class  hatred  they  were  always  inciting  under  the 
name  of  class  consciousness  was  as  abhorrent  to  him 
as  all  hatred  was. 

Sometimes  the  Socialists,  with  their  passion  for 
generalization,  for  labeling  and  pigeonholing  every- 
thing in  the  universe,  said  he  was  an  anarchist.  The 
more  charitable  of  them,  wishing  to  sterilize  the  term 
and  rid  it  of  its  sinister  implication,  but  still  insist- 
ently scientific,  said  he  was  a  "philosophic"  anar- 
chist. That  is  a  term  too  vague  to  use,  though  in 
one  sense,  I  suppose,  all  good  men  are  anarchists, 
in  that  they  would  live  their  lives  as  well  without 
laws  as  with  them.  Jones  himself  would  have  scorned 
those  classifications  as  readily  as  he  would  had  any- 
one said  he  was  a  duke  or  an  earl.  "No  title  is 
higher  than  Man,"  he  wrote  once  in  a  little  campaign 
song.    And  he  was  that — a  Man. 

141 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

He  would  not  join  any  society  or,  as  he  said, 
"belong"  to  anything.  I  have  thought  so  often  of 
what  he  said  to  a  book  agent  one  day.  We  were 
just  on  the  point  of  leaving  the  Mayor's  office  for 
luncheon,  and  the  individual  who  wishes  "just  a 
minute"  was  inevitably  there,  blocking  the  way  out 
of  the  office.  He  was  indubitably  a  book  agent ;  any- 
one who  has  a  rudimentary  knowledge  of  human  na- 
ture can  identify  them  at  once,  but  this  one  had  as 
his  insinuating  disguise  some  position  as  a  repre- 
sentative of  a  Thomas  Jefferson  Memorial  Associa- 
tion, and  he  was  there  to  confer  on  the  Mayor  the 
honor  of  a  membership  in  that  society. 

"And  what  books  am  I  required  to  buy?"  asked 
Jones. 

"Well,"  the  agent  said,  "you  are  not  required 
to  buy  any  books,  but,  of  course,  a  member  of 
the  association  would  naturally  want  Mr.  Jef- 
ferson's complete  works."  Jones's  eyes  were  twink- 
ling; "Mr."  Jefferson  amused  him  immensely,  of 
course. 

"They  are  very  popular,"  the  man  went  on,  "many 
persons  are  buying  them." 

"I  don't  find  the  ideas  in  them  very  popular;  cer- 
tainly those  in  Mr.  Jefferson's  greatest  work  are 
not  popular;  no  one  wants  to  see  them  adopted." 

"To  which  one  of  his  works  do  you  refer?"  asked 
the  agent. 

"Why,  the  one  that  is  best  known,"  said  Jones,  "its 
title  is  'The  Declaration  of  Independence.'  I  al- 
ready have  a  copy  of  that." 

The  poor  fellow  was  conscious  that  his  enterprise 
142 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

was  not  going  very  well,  but  he  said,  with  a  flourish 
of  magnanimity:        # 

"Oh,  well,  it's  immaterial  to  me  whether  you  take 
the  books  or  not,  but  of  course  you  will  wish  to 
belong  to  the  association?" 

"But  I  already  belong  to  the  association  in  which 
Mr.  Jefferson  was  chiefly  interested,"  said  Jones. 

"What  is  that,  may  I  ask?"  said  the  agent. 

"The  United  States  of  America,"  said  Jones, 
"and  as  I  am  a  member  of  that,  I  see  no  reason  why 
I  should  join  anything  smaller." 

And  then  he  laughed,  and  if  there  had  been  any 
uneasiness  because  of  his  gentle  guying,  it  disap- 
peared when  he  laid  his  hand  on  the  agent's  shoulder 
and  looked  into  his  eyes  in  that  spirit  of  friendliness 
which  enveloped  him  like  an  aureole. 

He  had  a  conception  of  unity  that  was  far  be- 
yond his  contemporaries,  a  conception  that  will  be 
beyond  humanity  for  many  years.  It  was  that  con- 
ception which  enabled  him  to  see  through  the  vast 
superstition  of  war,  and  the  superstition  of  par- 
tizanship,  and  all  the  other  foolish  credulities  that 
have  misled  the  people  in  all  times. 

One  evening,  it  was  just  at  dark,  we  were  leaving 
the  mayor's  office  to  walk  home — we  walked  home 
together  nearly  every  evening — and  in  the  dusk  a 
tramp,  a  negro,  came  up  and  asked  him  for  the  price 
of  a  night's  lodging.  The  Mayor  fumbled  in  his 
pockets,  but  he  had  no  small  change,  he  had  only  a 
five-dollar  bill,  but  he  gave  this  to  the  tramp  and 
said : 

"Go  get  it  changed,  and  bring  it  back." 
143  ' 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

The  tramp  took  it  and  disappeared,  and  we 
waited.  Jones  talked  on  about  other  things,  but  I 
was  interested  in  the  tramp;  my  expectation  of  his 
return  was  far  more  uncertain  than  Jones's.  But 
after  a  while  the  tramp  did  come  back,  and  he  poured 
out  into  the  Mayor's  hand  the  change  in  silver  coin. 
The  Mayor  complained  humanly  of  the  heavy 
silver  which  the  Secretary  of  the  Treasury  always 
sends  out  to  Us,  so  that  the  new  one-dollar  bills 
may  go  to  New  York  City,  and  tumbled  the  money 
.into  his  trousers  pocket. 

"But  ain't  you  goin'  to  count  it?"  asked  the  negro 
in  surprise. 

"Did  you  count  it  ?"  asked  Jones. 

"Yes,  suh,  I  counted  it." 

"Was  it  all  there,  wasn't  it  all  right?" 

"Yes,  suh." 

"Well,  then,  there's  no  need  for  me  to  count  it, 
is  there?" 

The  negro  looked  in  wide  white-eyed  surprise. 

"Did  you  take  out  what  you  wanted?"  asked  the 
Mayor. 

"No,  suh,  I  didn't  take  any." 

"Here,  then,"  said  Jones,  and  he  gave  the  man  a 
half-dollar  and  went  on. 

There  was  no  possible  ostentation  in  this ;  it  was 
perfectly  natural;  he  was  doing  such  things  every 
hour  of  the  day. 

He  had  no  need  to  stop  there,  in  the  dark,  to  im- 
press me,  his  friend  and  intimate.  I  do  him  wrong 
even  to  stoop  to  explain  so  much.  But  I  wonder  how 
much  good  his  confidence  did  that  wandering  out- 

144 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

cast?  How  much  good  did  it  do  to  me?  By  the 
operation  of  the  same  law  which  brought  that  va- 
grant back  to  Jones's  side  with  all  the  money,  I 
with  my  distrust,  might  have  been  treated  far  dif- 
ferently. 

Or  so,  at  least,  it  seems  to  me,  and  I  tell  this 
incident  as  one  which  proves  the  reverence  Jones 
had  for  the  great  natural  law  of  love.  For  the  chief 
count  in  the  indictment  respectability  brought 
against  him  was  that  he  had  no  reverence  for  law. 
To  see  and  hear  them  when  they  said  this,  one  would 
have  supposed  that  a  council  or  legislature  had  never 
been  corrupted  in  the  land.  It  used  to  amuse  Jones 
to  reflect  that  his  literal  acceptance  of  the  funda- 
mental principle  of  Christianity  should  have  been 
such  a  novel  and  unprecedented  thing  that  it  in- 
stantly marked  him  out  from  all  the  other  Chris- 
tians and  made  him  famous  in  Christendom. 


XXVI 

I  say  famous,  and  perhaps  I  mean  only  notorious, 
for  in  the  beginning  many  of  his  townsmen  meant 
it  as  a  reflection,  and  not  a  tribute.  Some  of  them 
said  it  was  but  an  advertising  dodge,  a  bit  of  dema- 
gogism,  but  as  Jones  applied  the  rule  to  everybody, 
other  explanations  had  soon  to  be  adopted,  and 
after  he  had  employed  it  about  the  City  Hall  for 
two  years  the  situation  became  so  desperate  that 
something  had  to  be  done.  Controversy  was  pro- 
voked, and  for  almost  a  decade,  Toledo  presented 

145 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

the  unique  spectacle  of  a  modern  city  in  which  this 
principle  was  discussed  as  though  it  were  something 
newly  discovered.  Some  seemed  to  think  that  Jones 
had  invented  it;  they  said  it  was  absurd,  that  it 
really  would  not  work.  Of  course  most  regarded  it, 
as  most  now  regard  the  Golden  Rule,  as  a  pretty 
sentiment  merely,  something  for  the  children  in  Sun- 
day-school. It  is  considered,  of  course,  as  any 
sophisticated  person  knows,  as  altogether  imprac- 
tical, and  even  silly  and  absurd. 

To  be  sure,  the  clergymen  were  under  some  sort 
of  professional  necessity  of  treating  it  seriously,  and 
they  used  to  prepare  profound  papers,  arranged  in 
heads  and  subheads,  with  titles  and  subtitles,  and 
after  all  the  usual  ostentatious  preliminary  exami- 
nation of  the  grounds  and  the  authorities,  and  with 
the  appearance  of  academic  fairness,  in  discussions 
that  were  formal,  exact,  redolent  of  the  oil,  bearing 
the  hallmark  of  the  schools,  they  would  show  that 
Jesus  meant  there  were  only  certain  exigencies  in 
which,  and  certain  persons  to  whom,  this  rule  was 
to  be  applied.  It  was  all  very  learned  and  impres- 
sive, but  one  was  apt  to  develop  a  disturbing  doubt 
as  to  whether  one  was  of  those  to  whom  it  was 
to  be  applied.  It  was  certainly  not  to  be  applied  to 
criminals,  or  perhaps  even  to  politicians.  It  was  not 
to  be  applied  to  poor  people,  or  to  the  working 
people,  unless  they  were  in  Sunday-school  as  con- 
scious inferiors,  in  devout  and  penitent  attitudes. 
And  as  these  people  were  so  seldom  in  church  or 
Sunday-school,  and  as  those  who  were  there  appar- 
ently needed  no  such  consideration,  these  discourses 

146 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

left  one  rather  uncertain  as  to  what  to  do  with  the 
Golden  Rule. 

All  men  of  course  believe  in  the  Golden  Rule,  or 
say  they  do,  but  they  believe  in  it  only  "up  to  a 
certain  point,"  and  with  each  individual  this  point 
differs ;  the  moment  in  which  to  abandon  the  Rule 
and  take  to  "the  shotgun  and  the  club"  comes  to 
some  soon,  to  others  late,  and  to  some  oftener  than 
others ;  but  to  most,  if  not  to  all  of  us,  it  inevitably 
arrives.  That  is  why,  no  doubt,  the  world  is  no 
farther  along  in  the  solution  of  the  many  distress- 
ing problems  it  has  on  its  mind. 

According  to  the  standards  of  conduct  and  of 
"honor"  inherited  from  the  feudal  ages,  while  per- 
sonal violence  may  be  conceded  to  be  illegal,  one  is, 
nevertheless,  still  generally  taught  that  it  is  wrong 
and  unmanly  not  to  resent  an  insult  or  an  injury,  by 
violence,  if  necessary, — fighting  and  killing,  by  in- 
dividuals, states  and  nations,  are  thought  to  be  not 
only  honorable  and  worthy,  but,  in  many  cases,  indis- 
pensable. Society  has  an  obsession  similar  to  that 
strange  superstition  of  the  feud,  which  affects  the 
Kentucky  mountaineers.  Generally  we  are  less 
afraid  to  fight  than  we  are  not  to  fight.  Our  system 
is  based  on  force,  our  faith  is  placed  in  force,  so  that 
nearly  all  of  the  proposals  of  reform,  for  the  cor- 
rection of  abuses,  involve  the  use  of  violence  in  some 
form.  We  have  erected  a  huge  idol  in  the  figure  of 
the  beadle,  who,  assisted  by  the  constable,  is  to  make 
society  over,  to  make  men  "good."  Jones  came  upon 
the  scene  in  America  at  a  time  when  there  was  un- 
doubtedly a  new  and  really  splendid  impetus  toward 

147 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

a  better  and  higher  conception  of  life  and  conduct, 
both  in  public  and  private.  Yet  even  then  no  other 
thought  seemed  to  possess  the  public  mind  than  that 
someone  should  be  put  in  prison  and  made  to  suffer. 
Men  did  not  and  do  not  see  what  Jones  saw  so 
much  more  clearly  than  any  other  reformer  of  his 
time,  namely  that,  above  all  the  laws  men  make  with 
their  political  machines  in  their  legislatures,  there 
is  a  higher  law,  and  that  the  Golden  Rule  is  a  rule 
of  conduct  deduced  from  that  law.  He  saw  that 
men,  whether  they  knew  it  or  not,  liked  it  or  not,  or 
were  conscious  of  it  or  not,  had  in  all  times  been 
living,  and  must  forever  go  on  living,  under  the  prin- 
ciple on  which  the  Golden  Rule  is  based.  That  is, 
Jones  saw  that  this  great  law  had  always  existed 
in  the  universe,  just  as  the  law  of  gravitation  existed 
before  Newton  discovered  it.  It  is  inherent  in  the 
very  constitution  of  things,  as  one  of  that  body  of 
laws  which  govern  the  universe  and  always  act  and 
react  equally  among  men.  And  Jones  felt  that  men 
should  for  their  comfort,  if  for  no  higher  motive, 
respect  this  law  and  get  the  best  out  of  life  by  ob- 
serving it ;  and  that  it  should  be  the  business  of  men 
through  their  governments  to  seek  out  this  law  and 
the  rules  that  might  scientifically  be  deduced  from 
it,  instead  of  putting  their  faith  in  their  own  contriv- 
ances of  statutes,  resolutions,  orders,  and  decrees, 
and,  when  these  would  not  work,  trying  to  make  them 
effective  through  grand  juries  and  petit  juries,  and 
all  the  hideous  machinery  of  jails  and  prisons,  and 
scaffolds  and  electric  chairs.  And  because  he  had  no 
superstitious  reverence  for  policemen  or  their  clubs, 

148 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

or  for  soldiers  and  their  bayonets  and  machine  guns, 
they  said  he  had  no  reverence  for  law. 

He  had,  of  course,  been  to  the  legislature;  he 
had  seen  the  midnight  sessions  there,  when  statutes 
were  enacted  amid  scenes  of  drunken  riot  and  confu- 
sion, and  he  saw  no  reason  why  he  should  have  rever- 
ence for  the  acts  of  these  men.  Perhaps  he  was 
wrong;  I  am  only  trying  to  tell  how  it  appeared  to 
him.  He  was  not  a  lawyer,  but  he  knew  what  many 
lawyers  have  never  learned,  that  there  is  sometimes 
a  vast  difference  between  a  statute  and  a  law.  He 
saw  that  not  all  statutes  are  laws ;  that  they  are  laws 
only  when,  by  accident  or  design,  they  are  in  con- 
formity with  those  rules  by  which  the  universe  is 
governed,  whether  in  the  physical  or  the  spiritual 
world,  and  these  laws,  eternal  and  immutable,  are 
invariable,  self-executing,  instant  in  operation,  with- 
out judges  to  declare  them,  or  executives  to  enforce 
them,  or  courts  to  say  whether  they  are  unconsti- 
tutional or  not. 

He  saw  that  the  law  on  which  the  Golden  Rule  is 
founded,  the  law  of  moral  action  and  reaction,  is  the 
one  most  generally  ignored.  Its  principle  he  felt  to 
be  always  at  work,  so  that  men  lived  by  it  whether 
they  wished  to  or  not,  whether  they  knew  it  or  not. 
According  to  this  law,  hate  breeds  hate  and  love  pro- 
duces love  in  return;  and  all  force  begets  resistance, 
and  the  result  is  the  general  disorder  and  anarchy 
in  which  we  live  so  much  of  the  time. 

It  may  be  that  in  this  view  of  life  some  dangerous 
apothegms  are  involved;  as  we  grow  older  we  grow 
conservative,  and  conservatism  is  a  kind  of  cynicism, 

149 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

a  kind  of  fear,  the  trembling  distrust  of  age.  But  I 
know  that  in  the  life  concept  to  which  Jones  came 
in  his  study  of  this  principle,  every  act  of  his  life, 
no  matter  how  trifling  and  insignificant  it  may  have 
seemed,  suddenly  took  on  a  vast  and  vital  signifi- 
cance; so  that  the  hasty  glance,  the  unkind  word, 
the  very  spirit  in  which  a  thing  is  said  or  done,  were 
seen  to  have  an  effect  which  may  reach  farther  than 
the  imagination  can  go,  an  effect  not  only  on  one's 
own  life  and  character,  but  on  the  lives  and  charac- 
ters of  all  those  about  him.  He  was  always  human ; 
I  say  that  to  prevent  any  impression  that  he  was 
solemn  or  priggish ;  he  deliberately  took  up  smoking, 
for  instance,  toward  the  end  of  his  days,  because,  he 
said  with  a  chuckle,  one  must  have  some  vices.  And 
sometimes  when  the  Golden  Rule  seemed  not  to 
"work,"  he  would  truly  say  it  was  only  because  he 
didn't  know  how  to  work  it.  And  he  used  to  quote 
Walt  Whitman : 

The  song  is  to  the  singer  and  comes  back  most  to  him; 

The  love  is  to  the  lover  and  comes  back  most  to  him; 
The  gift  is  to  the  giver,  and  comes  back  most  to  him — 
it  cannot  fail. 


150 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 


XXVII 

I  first  saw  Tom  Johnson  in  the  early  nineties  in 
Cleveland,  at  a  Democratic  state  convention,  where 
one  naturally  might  have  expected  to  see  him.  I 
had  gone  to  Cleveland  to  report  the  convention  for 
the  Chicago  Herald,  and  since  it  was  summer,  and 
summer  in  Ohio,  it  was  a  pleasant  thing  to  be  back 
again  among  the  Democrats  of  my  own  state,  many 
of  whom  I  had  known,  some  of  whom  I  honored. 
And  that  morning — I  think  it  was  the  morning 
after  some  frenzied  members  of  the  Hamilton  county 
delegation  had  been  shooting  at  one  another  in 
Banks  street  in  an  effort  to  settle  certain  of  those 
differences  in  the  science  of  statecraft  which  then 
were  apt,  as  they  are  now,  to  trouble  the  counsels 
of  the  Cincinnati  politicians — I  was  walking  along 
Superior  Street  when  I  heard  a  band  playing  the 
sweet  and  somehow  pathetic  strains  of  "Home  Again, 
Home  Again."  There  were  other  bands  playing  that 
morning,  but  the  prevailing  tune  was  "The  Camp- 
bells are  Coming" ;  for  we  might  as  well  have  been 
Scotchmen  at  the  siege  of  Lucknow  in  Ohio  during 
those  years  that  James  E.  Campbell  was  Governor 
of  our  state.  We  grew  to  love  the  tune  and  we  grew 
to  love  him,  he  was  so  brilliant  and  human  and  affa- 
ble ;  but  he  could  not  pose  very  well  in  a  frock  coat, 
and  after  he  had  been  renominated  at  that  very 
convention,  McKinley  defeated  him  for  governor. 

But  as  I  was  saying,  it  was  not  "The  Campbells 
are  Coming"  which  the  band  was  playing  that  morn- 

151 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

ing,  but  "Home  Again,"  and  along  the  wide  street, 
with  an  intimate  sense  of  proprietorship  that  ex- 
cluded strangers  from  this  particular  demonstration, 
people  were  saying: 

"It's  Tom  Johnson,  home  from  Europe!" 
It  was  his  own  employees  who  had  gone  forth  to 
meet  him,  the  men  who  worked  for  him  in  the  street 
railway  system  he  owned  in  Cleveland  in  those  days, 
and  I  thought  it  rather  a  pretty  compliment  that  a 
man's  employees  should  like  him  so  well  that  they 
would  turn  out  to  welcome  him  with  a  band  when  he 
came  home  from  his  holiday  abroad.  I  could  under- 
stand their  feeling  when  an  hour  later  I  saw  Tom 
Johnson  in  the  Hollenden  Hotel,  the  center  of  a 
group  of  political  friends ;  he  seemed  as  glad  as  any 
of  them  to  be  back  among  so  many  Democrats.  He 
still  had  his  youth,  and  there  was  in  his  manner  a 
peculiar,  subtle  charm,  a  gift  with  which  the  gods 
are  rather  stingy  among  the  sons  of  men.  I  can  see 
him  now,  his  curly  hair  moist  with  the  heat  of  the 
summer  day,  his  profile,  clear  enough  for  a  Greek 
coin,  and  the  smile  that  never  failed  him,  or  failed 
a  situation,  to  the  end.  He  was,  I  think,  in  Congress 
in  those  days  of  which  I  am  writing,  or  if  he  was 
not,  he  went  to  Congress  soon  after  from  one  of  the 
Cleveland  districts.  And  while  he  was  there  he  wrote 
a  remarkable  letter  in  response  to  a  communication 
he  had  received  from  some  girls  who  worked  in  a 
cloak  factory  in  Cleveland,  asking  him  to  vote 
against  the  Wilson  tariff  bill  when  it  was  amended 
by  adding  a  specific  duty  to  the  ad  valorem  duty  on 
women's  cloaks.     The  girls,  of  course,  poor  things, 

152 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

had  not  written  the  communication;  it  was  written 
by  the  editor  of  a  protectionist  newspaper  in  Cleve- 
land, and  the  response  which  Johnson  sent  was  one 
of  the  simplest  and  clearest  expositions  of  the  evils 
of  protection  I  ever  read.  I  had  read  it  when  it  was 
published,  and  had  been  delighted,  but  it  was  not 
for  a  dozen  years  that  I  was  able  to  tell  Johnson 
of  my  delight,  and  then  one  day  as  he  and  Dr. 
Frederic  C.  Howe  and  I  were  at  luncheon  I  spoke 
of  the  letter.     He  laughed. 

"It  was  a  great  letter,  wasn't  it?"  he  said. 

"Indeed  it  was,"  I  replied. 

"A  wonderful  letter,"  he  went  on.  "You  know,  it 
completely  shut  them  up  around  here.  The  editor  of 
that  paper  tried  for  weeks  to  reply  to  it,  and  then 
he  gave  it  up,  and  he  told  me  privately  some  time 
afterward  that  he  was  sure  the  theory  of  protection 
was  right,  but  that  it  wouldn't  work  on  women's 
cloaks.  Yes,  it  was  a  great  letter."  And  then  with 
a  sigh,  he  added:  "I  wish  I  could  have  written  such 
a  letter.  Henry  George  worked  on  that  letter  for 
days  and  nights  before  we  got  it  to  suit  us ;  I'd 
think  and  think,  and  he'd  write  and  write,  and  then 
tear  up  what  he  had  written,  but  finally  we  got  it 
down." 

Henry  George  was  the  great  influence  in  his  life, 
as  he  has  been  the  influence  in  the  lives  of  so  many 
in  this  world.  Johnson  had  been  a  plutocrat ;  he  had 
made,  or  to  use  a  distinction  Golden  Rule  Jones  used 
to  insist  upon,  he  had  "gathered,"  by  the  time  he  was 
thirty,  an  immense  fortune,  through  legal  privileges. 
Johnson's  privileges  had  been  tariffs  on  steel,  and 

153 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

street  railway  franchises  in  several  cities,  and  thus 
early  in  life  he  was  almost  ready  for  tfyat  most 
squalid  of  all  poverty,  mere  possession.  And  then 
suddenly  he  had  a  marvelous  experience,  one  that 
comes  to  few  men ;  he  caught  a  vision  of  a  new  social 
order. 

He  was  on  a  railway  train  going  from  Indianap- 
olis to  New  York,  and  the  news  agent  on  the  train 
importuned  him  to  buy  a  novel.  Johnson  waved 
him  aside — I  can  imagine  with  what  imperious  impa- 
tience. But  this  agent  was  not  to  be  waved  aside; 
he  persisted  after  the  manner  of  his  kind;  he  had 
that  weird  occult  power  by  which  the  book  agent 
weaves  his  spell  and  paralyzes  the  will,  even  such  a 
superior  will  as  Tom  Johnson's,  and  the  agent  sold 
to  him,  not  a  novel,  but  Henry  George's  "Social 
Problems."  He  was  not  given  to  reading;  he  read 
only  for  information,  and  even  then  he  usually  had 
some  one  else  read  to  him.  Once  during  his  last  ill- 
ness he  asked  me  what  I  was  reading,  and  I  told  him 
Ferrero's  "Rome,"  and  tried  to  give  him  some  notion 
of  Ferrero's  description  of  the  political  machine 
which  Caesar  and  Pompey  had  organized,  and  of  the 
private  fire  department  of  Crassus,  and  he  said: 
"Well,  I'll  have  Newton  read  it  to  me."  He  used  to 
wonder  sometimes  half  wistfully,  as  though  he  were 
missing  some  good  in  life,  how  it  was  that  I  loved 
poetry  so,  and  it  was  somehow  consoling  when  Mr. 
Richard  McGhee,  that  fine  Irish  member  of  Parlia- 
ment, told  me  one  night  in  the  House  of  Commons 
that  when  Johnson  made  that  last  journey  to  Eng- 
land he  had  read  Burns  to  him,  and  that  Johnson 

154 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

had  loved  and  even  recited  certain  passages  from 
them.  Well  then,  Johnson  bought  his  book,  and  idly 
turning  the  pages  began  to  read,  became  interested, 
finally  enthralled,  and  read  on  and  on.  Later  he 
bought  "Progress  and  Poverty,"  and  as  he  read  that 
wonderful  book,  as  there  dawned  upon  his  conscious- 
ness the  awful  realization  that  notwithstanding  all 
the  amazing  progress  mankind  has  made  in  the 
world,  poverty  has  kept  even  pace  with  it,  stalking 
ever  at  its  side,  that  with  all  of  man's  inventions, 
labor-saving  devices,  and  all  that,  there  has  been  no 
such  amelioration  of  the  human  lot,  no  such  improve- 
ment in  society  as  should  have  come  from  so  much 
effort  and  achievement,  he  had  a  spiritual  awaken- 
ing, experienced  within  him  something  that  was  veri- 
tably, as  the  Methodists  would  say,  a  "conversion." 
There  was  an  instant  revolution  in  his  nature,  or  in 
his  purpose ;  he  turned  to  confront  life  in  an  entirely 
new  attitude,  and  he  began  to  have  that  which  so 
many,  rich  and  poor,  utterly  lack,  so  many  to  whom 
existence  is  but  a  meaningless  confusion  of  the 
senses,  a  life  concept.  And  with  this  new  concept 
there  came  a  new  ideal. 

He  at  once  sought  out  Henry  George,  the  two 
became  fast  friends,  and  the  friendship  lasted  until 
George's  dramatic  death  in  the  midst  of  his  cam- 
paign for  the  mayoralty  of  New  York.  George  used 
to  do  much  of  his  work  at  the  Johnson  home  in 
Cleveland — and  used  to  forget  to  fasten  his  collar 
when  he  was  called  from  that  spell  of  concentration 
over  his  desk  to  the  dinner  table.  The  Johnsons 
were  aristocrats  from  Kentucky,  descended  from  a 

155 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

long  line  of  southern  ancestors.  And  yet  Tom 
Johnson  was  a  Democrat,  from  conviction  and  prin- 
ciple. In  fact  it  seems  almost  as  though  the  cause 
of  democracy  would  never  have  got  on  at  all  if 
now  and  then  it  had  not  had  aristocrats  to  lead  it, 
as  ever  it  has  had,  from  the  times  of  the  Gracchi  to 
those  of  the  Mirabeaus  and  the  Lafayettes  and  the 
Jeffersons. 

Tom  Johnson  made  an  instant  impression  when  he 
went  into  politics,  and  he  went  in  on  the  explicit 
advice  of  Henry  George.  When  he  arose  in  the 
House  of  Representatives  at  Washington  to  make  his 
first  speech,  no  one  paid  the  least  attention.  It  is,  I 
suppose,  the  most  difficult  place  in  the  world  to 
speak,  not  so  much  because  of  the  audience,  but  be- 
cause of  the  arrangement;  that  scattered  expanse 
of  desks  is  not  conducive  to  dramatic  effect,  or  to 
any  focusing  of  interest.  The  British  Parliament 
is  the  only  one  in  the  world  that  is  seated  properly; 
there  the  old  form  of  the  lists  is  maintained,  oppo- 
nents meet  literally  face  to  face  across  that  narrow 
chamber.  But  when  Johnson  arose  at  Washington, 
there  were  those  scattered  desks,  and  the  members — 
lolling  at  their  desks,  writing  letters,  reading  news- 
papers, clapping  their  hands  for  pages,  gossiping, 
sauntering  about,  arising  and  going  out,  giving  no 
heed  whatever.  But  Tom  Johnson  had  not  spoken 
many  words  before  Tom  Reed,  then  the  leader  on  the 
Republican  side,  suddenly  looked  up,  listened,  put 
his  hand  behind  his  ear,  and  leaning  forward  in- 
tently said:  "Sh!"  and  thus  brought  his  follow- 
ers  to   attention  before  the  new  and    strong  per- 

156 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

sonality  whose  power  he  had  so  instantly  recognized. 

It  was  a  power  that  was  felt  in  that  House.  They 
tried  to  shelve  him;  they  put  him  on  the  committee 
for  the  District  of  Columbia,  and  no  shelf  could 
have  pleased  him  more,  or  been  better  suited  to  his 
peculiar  genius,  for  it  gave  him  a  city  to  deal  with. 
The  very  first  thing  he  did  was  to  investigate  the 
revenues  of  the  District,  and  he  made  a  report  on 
the  subject,  based  on  the  theories  underlying  the 
proposition  of  the  single  tax.  He  tried  to  have  the 
single  tax  adopted  for  the  District,  and  while  he 
failed  in  that  design  his  report  is  a  classic  on  the 
whole  subject  of  municipal  taxation,  even  if,  like 
most  classics,  it  is  little  read.  He  made  some  splen- 
did speeches,  too,  on  the  tariff,  and  by  a  clever  de- 
vice, under  the  rule  giving  members  leave  to  print 
what  no  one  is  willing  to  hear,  he  contrived,  with 
the  help  of  several  colleagues,  to  distribute  over  the 
land  more  than  a  million  copies  of  Henry  George's 
"Protection  and  Free  Trade,"  giving  that  work  a 
larger  circulation  than  all  the  six  best  sellers  among 
the  romantic  novels. 

It  is  one  of  the  peculiar  weaknesses  of  our  politi- 
cal system  that  our  strongest  men  cannot  be  kept 
very  long  in  Congress,  and  it  was  Johnson's  fate  to 
be  defeated  after  his  second  term,  but  he  then  entered 
a  field  of  political  activity  which  was  not  only  thor- 
oughly congenial  to  him,  but  one  in  which  for  the 
present  the  struggle  for  democracy  must  be  carried 
on.  That  field  is  the  field  of  municipal  politics  which 
he  entered  just  at  the  time  of  the  awakening  which 
marked  the  first  decade  of  the  new  century. 

157 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 


XXVIII 

When  I  think  of  the  beginning  of  that  period  my 
thought  goes  back  to  an  afternoon  in  New  York, 
when,  sitting  in  the  editorial  rooms  of  McClure's 
Magazine,  Lincoln  Steffens  said  to  me : 

"I'm  going  to  do  a  series  of  articles  for  the  maga- 
zine on  municipal  government." 

"And  what  do  you  know  about  municipal  govern- 
ment?" I  asked  in  the  tone  a  man  may  adopt  with 
his  friend.    • 

"Nothing,"  he  replied.  "That's  why  I'm  going 
to  write  about  it." 

We  smiled  in  the  pleasure  we  both  had  in  his  fun, 
but  we  did  not  talk  long  about  municipal  government 
as  we  were  to  do  in  the  succeeding  years ;  we  had 
more  interesting  subjects  to  discuss  just  then. 

I  had  been  on  a  holiday  to  New  England  with  my 
friend  John  D.  Barry,  and  had  just  come  from 
Maine  where  I  had  spent  a  week  at  Kittery  Point, 
in  the  delight  of  long  summer  afternoons  in  the  com- 
pany of  Mr.  William  Dean  Howells,  whom,  indeed,  in 
my  vast  admiration,  and  I  might  say,  my  reverence 
for  him,  I  had  gone  there  to  see.  He  had  introduced 
me  to  Mark  Twain,  and  I  had  come  away  with  feel- 
ings that  were  no  less  in  intensity  I  am  sure  than 
those  with  which  Moses  came  down  out  of  Mount 
Horeb.  And  Steffens  and  I  celebrated  them  and 
their  writings  and  that  quality  of  right-mindedness 
they  both  got  into  their  writings,  and  we  had  our 
joy  in  their  perfect  Americanism.     The  word  had  a 

158 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

definite  meaning  for  us;  it  occurred  to  us  at  that 
time  because  of  some  tremendous  though  unavailing 
blows  which  Mark  Twain  had  delivered  against  our 
government's  policy  in  the  Philippines,  the  time 
falling  in  that  era  of  khaki  imperialism  which  opened 
in  this  land  with  the  Spanish  war  and  too  much 
reading  of  Kipling,  who,  if  I  could  bring  myself  to 
think  that  literature  has  any  influence  in  America, 
might  be  said  to  have  induced  us  to  imitate  England 
in  her  colonial  policy.  There  comes  back  the  picture 
of  Mark  Twain  as  he  sat  on  the  veranda  of  the 
home  he  had  that  summer  at  Sewell's  Bridge,  a  cot- 
tage on  a  hill  all  hidden  among  the  pines;  he  sat 
there  in  his  picturesque  costume  of  white  trousers 
and  blue  jacket,  with  his  splendid  plume  of  white 
hair,  and  he  smoked  cigar  after  cigar — he  was  an 
"end  to  end  smoker"  as  George  Ade  says — and  as 
he  sat  and  smoked  he  drawled  a  delightful  monologue 
about  some  of  his  experiences  with  apparitions  and 
telepathy  and  that  weird  sort  of  thing;  he  said  they 
were  not  to  be  published  during  his  life,  and  since 
his  death  I  have  been  waiting  to  see  them  in  print. 
He  had  just  been  made  a  Doctor  of  Laws  by  some 
university  in  June  of  that  year,  a  distinguishing  fact 
known  to  a  caller  from  the  fashionable  resort  of 
York  near  by,  who,  though  somewhat  hazy  as  to 
Mark  Twain's  performances  in  literature,  neverthe- 
less scrupulously  addressed  him  as  "Doctor,"  and 
every  time  he  was  thus  recognized  in  his  new  and 
scholarly  dignity,  he  winked  at  us  from  under  his 
shaggy  brows.  Perhaps  that  was  part  of  his  Ameri- 
canism, too,  unless  it  were  a  part  of  that  universality 

159 


FORTY   YEARS    OF   IT 

which  made  him  the  great  humorist  he  was,  and  phi- 
losopher, too;  an  universality  that  makes  Mr.  How- 
ells  a  humorist  as  well  as  a  novelist  and  a  philoso- 
pher— the  elements  are  scarcely  inseparable — 
though  Mr.  Howells's  humor  is  of  a  more  delicate 
quality  than  that  of  his  great  friend,  and,  as  one 
might  say,  colleague,  a  quality  so  rare  and  delicate 
and  delightful  that  some  folk  seem  to  miss  it  alto- 
gether. Perhaps  it  was  the  Americanism  of  these 
two  great  men  and  their  democracy  that  have  won 
them  such  recognition  in  Europe,  where  they  have 
represented  the  best  that  is  in  us. 

I  speak  of  their  democracy  for  the  purpose  of 
likening  it  in  its  very  essence  to  that  of  Golden 
Rule  Jones  and  of  Johnson,  too,  and  of  all  the  others 
who  have  struggled  in  the  human  cause.  We  owe 
Mr.  Howells  especially  a  debt  in  this  land.  He 
jeopardized  his  standing  as  an  artist,  perhaps,  by 
his  polemics  in  the  cause  of  realism  in  the  literary 
art,  but  he  was  the  first  to  look  about  him  and 
recognize  his  own  land  and  his  own  people  in  his 
fiction ;  that  is  why  it  is  so  very  much  the  life  of  our 
land  as  we  know  it,  and  to  me  there  came  long  ago 
a  wonderful  and  consoling  lesson,  when  in  reading 
after  him,  and  after  Tolstoy  and  Tourgenieff,  and 
Flaubert,  and  Zola,  and  Valdez,  and  Thomas  Hardy, 
I  discovered  that  people  are  all  alike,  and  like  all 
those  about  us  in  every  essential. 

Lincoln  Steffens  did  not  miss  the  humor  in  Mr. 
Howells's  writing,  because  he  could  not  miss  the 
humor  in  anything,  though  there  was  not  so  much 
humor  perhaps  in  another  writer  whom  we  had  just 

160 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

then  discovered  and  were  celebrating  that  day  in  the 
joy  of  our  discovery.  It  was  to  me  a  discovery  of 
the  greatest  charm,  a  charm  that  lasts  to  this  day 
in  everything  the  man  has  written,  that  charm  of  the 
sea  and  of  ships,  the  romance  and  poetry  of  it  all 
which  I  had  felt  ever  since  as  a  boy  I  found  a  noble 
friend  in  Gus  Wright,  an  old  sailor  whose  name  I 
cannot  speak  even  now  without  a  quickening  of  the 
spirit  because  of  the  glamour  that  invested  him  when 
I  sat  and  looked  at  him  and  realized  that  he  had 
hunted  whales  in  the  South  Pacific  and  had  sailed  the 
Seven  Seas.  I  wish  I  had  written  him  into  the  first 
of  these  papers,  where  he  belongs ;  he  made  two  mini- 
ature vessels  for  me,  one  a  full  rigged  ship,  the  other 
a  bark — dismantled  now,  both  of  them,  alas,  and 
long  since  out  of  commission.    .    .    . 

"You  go  down  to  the  wharves  along  the  East 
River,"  Steffens  was  saying,  "and  you'll  see  a  ship 
come  in,  and  after  she  has  been  made  fast  to  her 
wharf,  an  old  man  will  come  out  of  the  cabin,  light 
his  pipe,  and  lean  over  the  taffrail;  he'll  have  a 
brown,  weather-beaten  face,  and  as  he  leans  there 
smoking  slowly  and  peacefully,  his  voyage  done,  his 
eye  roving  calmly  about  here  and  there,  you'll  look 
at  him,  and  say  to  yourself,  'Those  eyes  have  seen 
everything  in  this  world !'  " 

It  was  a  rather  big  thought  when  you  dwelt  on  it. 

"He's  seen  everything  in  the  world,"  Steffens  went 
on,  "but  he  can't  tell  what  he's  seen.  Now  Conrad 
has  those  eyes,  he  has  seen  everything,  and  he  can 
tell  it." 

It  was  Joseph  Conrad,  of  course,  of  whom  we  were 
161 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

talking,  the  great  Pole  who  even  then  had  come  to 
a  mastery  of  our  language  that  might  shame  most 
of  his  contemporary  writers  in  it.  I  would  not  give 
"Lord  Jim"  for  all  the  other  sea  stories  that  were 
ever  written,  not  even  if  all  the  novels  of  Cooper 
and  Scott  and  Stevenson  and  Dickens  were  thrown 
in.  For  Joseph  Conrad  can  see  all  that  the  old  sailor 
Steffens  was  imagining  that  day  could  see,  and  far 
more  besides ;  he  can  see  into  the  human  soul.  He 
had  not  written  "Lord  Jim"  at  that  time,  or  if  he 
had,  I  had  not  read  it,  nor  had  Steffens  written  his 
books  about  municipal  government,  to  get  back  to 
the  subject;  too  often,  I  fear,  have  I  been  thinking 
about  some  book  of  Joseph  Conrad  when  I  should 
have  been  thinking  of  municipal  government. 

I  did  not  know  much  about  municipal  government 
in  those  days,  except  what  I  had  learned  in  Jones's 
campaigns  and  that  theoretical  knowledge  I  had 
obtained  in  the  courts  as  his  attorney,  and  I  had,  I 
fear,  the  same  indifference  to  the  subject  most  of 
our  citizens  have.  I  should  have  preferred  any  time 
to  talk  about  literature  and  I  should  prefer  to  do  so 
now,  since  that  is  really  so  much  more  interesting 
and  important.  But  the  fact  that  we  knew  nothing 
about  it  in  those  days  was  not  unusual ;  nobody  knew 
much  about  it  except  that  Mr.  James  Bryce  had 
said  that  it  was  the  most  conspicuous  failure  of  the 
American  Commonwealth,  and  we  quoted  this  obser- 
vation so  often  that  one  might  have  supposed  we 
were  proud  of  the  distinction.  Certainly  few  in 
America  in  those  days  understood  the  subject  in  the 
sense  in  which  it  is  understood  in  some  of  the  British 

162 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

cities,  like  Glasgow,  for  instance,  whose  municipal 
democracy  is  so  far  ahead  of  ours,  or  in  the  German 
cities  where  municipal  administration  is  veritably  a 
science.  But  in  Steffens's  case  a  lack  of  knowledge 
was  in  itself  a  qualification,  since  he  had  eyes,  like 
the  old  sailor,  and,  like  Joseph  Conrad,  the  power  to 
tell  what  he  saw.  That  is,  Steffens  had  vision,  im- 
agination, and  if  the  history  of  the  city  in  America 
is  ever  written  he  will  fill  a  large  place  on  its  page. 

I  marvel  when  I  reflect  that  he  could  see  so  clearly 
what  most  had  not  even  the  sensitiveness  to  feel.  He 
went  at  his  task  quite  in  the  scientific  spirit,  isolat- 
ing first  that  elementary  germ  or  microbe,  the  par- 
tizan,  the  man  who  always  voted  the  straight  ticket 
in  municipal  elections,  the  most  virulent  organism 
that  ever  infested  the  body  politic  and  as  uncon- 
scious of  its  toxic  power  as  the  bacillus  of  yellow 
fever.  Then  he  discovered  the  foul  culture  this  or- 
ganism blindly  breeds — the  political  machine,  with 
its  boss.  But  he  went  on  and  his  quest  led  him  to  the 
public  service  corporation,  the  street  railway  com- 
pany, the  gas  company,  the  electricity  company,  and 
then  his  trail  led  him  out  into  the  state,  and  he  pro- 
duced a  series  of  studies  of  politics  in  the  American 
cities  which  has  never  been  equaled,  and  so  had  a 
noble  and  splendid  part  in  the  great  awakening  of 
our  time. 

As  long  as  his  writings  exposed  only  the  low  and 
the  vulgar  politicians,  ward  heelers  and  bosses,  and 
the  like,  he  was  quite  popular;  I  believe  he  was  even 
asked  to  deliver  addresses  before  clubs  of  the  dilet- 
tante, and  even  in  churches,  for  the  righteous  were 

163 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

terrible  in  their  wrath.  But  when  he  went  more 
deeply,  when  he  exposed  the  respectable  connections 
of  the  machine  politicians,  some  of  his  admirers  fell 
away,  and  stood  afar  off,  like  certain  disciples  of 
old.  The  citizen  was  delighted  when  some  city  other 
than  his  own  was  under  the  scrutiny  of  the  sharp 
eyes  that  gleamed  behind  those  round  glasses,  but 
when  he  drew  near  for  a  local  study,  there  was  an 
uplifting  of  the  hands  in  pious  horror.  Cincinnati 
applauded  the  exposure  of  Minneapolis,  and  St. 
Louis  was  pleased  to  have  Philadelphia  reformed. 
Reform  is  popular  so  long  as  some  one  else  is  to  be 
reformed. 

XXIX 

Steffens  came  to  Toledo  occasionally,  and  I  recall 
an  evening  when  we  sat  in  my  library  and  he  told 
me  of  a  certain  editor  with  whom  he  had  been  talk- 
ing; the  editor  had  been  praising  his  work  with  a 
fervor  that  filled  Steffens  with  despair. 

"Must  I  write  up  every  city  in  the  United  States 
before  they  will  see?"  he  said.  "If  I  were  to  do 
Toledo,  how  that  chap  would  berate  me !" 

He  came  to  Toledo  early  in  his  investigations,  and 
I  took  him  to  see  Jones,  and  as  we  left  the  City 
Hall  in  the  late  afternoon  of  that  spring  day,  Stef- 
fens was  somehow  depressed ;  we  had  walked  a  block 
in  St.  Clair  Street  in  silence  when  he  said: 

"Why,  that  man's  program  will  take  a  thousand 
years !" 

It  did  seem  long  to  wait.  There  was  a  time  when 
164 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

I  thought  it  might  be  done  in  a  shorter  period,  but  I 
have  found  myself  under  the  necessity  of  extending 
the  term  from  time  to  time.  I  fear  now  that  Stef- 
fens's  estimate  of  the  length  of  Jones's  program 
was  rather  short,  but  I  know  of  no  other  way  that 
the  program  can  be  carried  out.  Steffens  himself 
is  not  so  impatient  now ;  he  learned  much  more  about 
our  cities  than  he  ever  wrote  or  dared  to  write,  much 
no  doubt  that  he  could  not  write.  Great  as  was 
the  data  he  collected,  before  all  the  conclusions 
could  be  drawn,  all  the  general  rules  deduced,  it 
would  be  necessary  to  have  the  data  of  all  life,  of 
which  the  cities  are  microcosms.  The  subject,  after 
all,  is  rather  large. 

But  to  some  it  seemed  simple  enough;  were  there 
not  policemen  patroling  their  beats  ready  to  arrest 
the  bad  people?  Thus  in  the  early  days  of  the 
awakening  in  America  impatience  took  on  the  form  it 
always  takes  with  us,  and  men  flew  to  the  old  idols 
of  our  race,  the  constable  and  the  policeman;  some- 
one must  be  hounded  down,  someone  must  be  put  in 
prison.  This  was  the  form  which  the  awakening 
took  in  many  places,  and  many  reputations  were 
built  up  in  that  wretched  work,  and  perhaps  the 
inadequacy  of  the  work  is  best  demonstrated  by  the 
instability  of  the  reputations.  I  suppose  that  such 
efforts  do  accomplish  something,  even  though  it  be 
at  such  fearful  cost;  they  may  educate  some,  but 
mostly  they  seem  to  me  to  gratify  a  taste  for  cheap 
sensation  and  reward  that  prurient  curiosity  which 
has  always  made  the  contemplation  of  sin  so  very 
fascinating  to  our  race.     The  reformer  was  abroad, 

165 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

seeking  to  make  mankind  over,  but  since  he  has  no 
model  more  attractive  than  himself  to  offer,  his  work 
never  goes  very  far,  and  he  returns  to  his  warfare 
on  the  cigarette,  or  in  moments  of  greater  courage, 
on  the  poor  girl  whose  figure  flits  by  in  the  dark- 
ness, followed  by  the  reformer's  devouring  eye. 

But  Steffens  did  not  write  us  up,  as  the  reporters 
phrase  it.  I  think  Jones  perplexed  him  in  those  first 
days,  though  he  knows  now  that  Jones  was  wholly 
and  I  had  almost  said  solely  right.  Jones  indeed 
perplexed  most  of  us.  A  man  with  a  program  of  a 
thousand  years  could  not  be  expected  to  interest  so 
vitally  our  impatient  democracy,  as  would  one  with 
a  program  so  speedy  and  simple  that  it  involved 
nothing  more  complex  than  putting  all  the  bad  peo- 
ple in  jail;  and  there  was  always  someone  ready 
to  point  out  the  bad  people,  so  that  it  seemed  sim- 
ple, as  well  it  might  to  those  who  had  forgotten 
that  even  that  program  is  six  thousand  years  old, 
at  least,  according  to  Archbishop  Ussher's  chronol- 
ogy. Steffens,  however,  was  seeking  types  and  in 
the  two  leading  cities  of  Ohio  he  found  them  so 
perfect  that  he  need  never  have  gone  further — had  it 
not  been  for  people  like  that  fellow  citizen  of  ours 
who  filled  Steffens  with  such  despair.  But  while  he 
was  gathering  his  data  on  Cincinnati  and  on  Cleve- 
land he  came  to  see  us  often,  to  our  delight,  and  con- 
tinued to  come,  so  that  he  knew  our  city  and  our 
politics  almost  better  than  we  knew  them  ourselves. 
He  went  to  Cleveland,  I  remember,  with  some  dis- 
tinct prejudice  against  Tom  Johnson;  the  prejudice 
so  easily  imbibed  in  gentlemen's  clubs.     But  I  was 

166 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

delighted  when,  after  his  investigation,  he  wrote  that 
story  in  McClure's  which  characterized  Tom  John- 
son as  the  best  mayor  of  the  best  governed  city  in 
the  United  States.  I  was  delighted  because  I  was 
flattered  in  my  own  opinion,  because  I  was  fond  of 
Tom  Johnson,  and  because  it  appeared  just  in  the 
nick  of  time  to  turn  the  tide  in  Johnson's  third 
campaign. 

Jones  was  delighted,  too;  he  had  said  almost  im- 
mediately after  Johnson  became  mayor  of  Cleveland 
that  he  "loved  him"  because,  in  appointing  the 
Reverend  Harris  R.  Cooley  as  Director  of  Charities 
and  Corrections,  Johnson  selected  a  man  who  began 
at  once  to  parole  prisoners  from  the  workhouse,  and 
Jones  and  Johnson  became  friends  as  Johnson  and 
Pingree  had  been  friends.  It  was  a  peculiar  instance 
of  the  whimsical  and  profligate  generosity  of  the 
fates  that  the  three  cities  grouped  at  the  western 
end  of  Lake  Erie  like  those  cities  Walt  Whitman 
saw,  or  thought  he  saw,  "as  sisters  with  their  arms 
around  each  others'  necks"  should  have  had  about 
the  same  time  three  such  mayors  as  Pingree  in  De- 
troit, Johnson  in  Cleveland  and  Jones  in  Toledo, 
though  the  three  men  were  different  in  everything 
except  their  democracy. 

Johnson's  success  in  Cleveland,  obtained  nominally 
as  a  Democrat,  though  in  his  campaign  he  was  as 
non-partizan  as  Jones  himself,  made  him  the  "logi- 
cal" candidate  of  the  Democrats  in  the  state  for 
governor,  and  when  he  was  nominated  for  that  office 
he  burst  upon  the  old  Republican  state  like  a  new 
planet  flaming  in  the  heavens.     Many  of  the  Demo- 

167 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

crats  found  that  he  was  entirely  too  logical  in  his 
democracy,  since  he  was  as  like  as  not  to  denounce  a 
Democratic  office  holder  as  any  other.  He  went  forth 
to  his  campaign  that  year  in  his  big  French  touring 
car,  a  way  entirely  new  to  us,  and  in  the  car  he  went 
from  town  to  town,  holding  his  immense  meetings  in 
a  circus  tent  which  was  taken  down  and  sent  on 
ahead  each  night.  In  this  way  he  was  entirely  inde- 
pendent of  local  committees,  and  they  did  not  like 
that  very  well ;  it  had  been  his  wealth  more  than  his 
democracy  that  had  made  him  seem  so  logical  as  a 
candidate  to  some  of  the  Democrats.  Such  a  spec- 
tacle had  not  been  seen  on  our  country  roads  as 
that  great  touring  car  made;  it  was  a  red  car,  and 
the  newspapers  called  it  "the  red  devil" ;  sometimes 
they  were  willing  to  apply  the  epithet  to  its  occu- 
pant. It  was  inevitable,  of  course,  that  provincial- 
ism should  criticize  him  for  having  bought  his  car 
in  France  instead  of  the  home  market,  and  I  shall 
never  forget,  so  irresistible  in  retort  was  he,  the  in- 
stant reply  he  made: 

"That  complaint  comes  in  very  bad  grace  from 
you  protectionists.  I  bought  my  car  in  France  it  is 
true  and  paid  $5,000  for  it,  but  I  paid  you  $3,000 
more  in  tariff  duties  to  let  me  bring  it  home.  You 
made  me  pay  for  it  twice  and  I  think  I  own  it  now." 

Few  have  ever  been  vilified  or  abused  as  Johnson 
was  abused  in  our  state  that  year ;  his  red  car  might 
have  been  a  chariot  of  flame  driven  by  an  anarchist, 
from  the  way  some  of  the  people  talked.  Strange, 
inexplicable  hatred  in  humanity  for  those  who  love 
it  most!    Tom  Johnson  campaigned  that  year  on  a 

168 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

platform  which  demanded  a  two-cent-a-mile  railway 
fare  and  the  taxation  of  railroad  property  at  some- 
thing like  its  value,  or  at  least,  he  said  the  railroads 
should  pay  in  taxes  as  much,  relatively,  as  a  man 
paid  on  his  home ;  the  poor  man  was  paying  on  more 
than  a  sixty  per  cent,  valuation  while  the  railways 
were  valued  at  eighteen  or  twenty  per  cent.  This 
was  dangerous,  even  revolutionary  doctrine,  of 
course,  and  Johnson  was  a  single-taxer,  supposed 
in  Ohio  to  be  a  method  of  taxation  whereby  every- 
body would  be  relieved  of  taxation  except  the  farm- 
ers who  were  to  be  taxed  according  to  the  super- 
ficial area  of  their  farms.  And  of  course  Johnson 
was  defeated,  and  yet  within  two  years  the  legisla- 
ture enacted  the  first  of  these  proposals  into  law 
with  but  one  dissenting  vote.  Thus  heresy  becomes 
orthodoxy.  The  proposal  for  taxation  reform  still 
waits,  and  will  wait,  I  fancy,  for  years,  since  it  is  so 
fundamental,  and  mankind  never  attacks  funda- 
mental problems  until  it  has  exhausted  all  the  super- 
ficial ones.  And  yet,  while  many  other  changes  he 
contended  for  in  his  day  have  been  made,  while  many 
of  his  heresies  have  become  orthodoxies,  the  fear  of 
him  possessed  the  rural  mind  in  the  legislature  until 
his  death,  and  almost  any  measure  could  be  defeated 
by  merely  uttering  the  formula  "Tom  Johnson." 


XXX 

One  remembers  one's  friends  in  various  attitudes, 
and  I  see  Tom  Johnson  now  standing  on  the  plat- 

169 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

form  in  the  old  tent,  under  the  flaring  lights,  with 
the  eager  crowd  before  him — there  were  never  such 
intelligent  audiences  to  speak  to  as  those  in  Cleve- 
land, unless  it  were  those  in  Toledo — and  he  was  at 
his  best  when  the  crowd  was  heckling  him.  He  was 
like  Severus  Cassius,  who,  as  Montaigne  says,  "spoke 
best  extempore,  and  stood  more  obliged  to  fortune 
than  his  own  diligence;  it  was  an  advantage  to  him 
to  be  interrupted  in  speaking,  and  his  adversaries 
were  afraid  to.  nettle  him,  lest  his  anger  redouble  his 
eloquence."  He  voluntarily  introduced  the  custom  of 
heckling  so  prevalent  in  England  and  Scotland,  be- 
cause at  first  he  was  not  a  proficient  speaker ;  he  was 
so  simple,  so  direct,  so  positive,  that  he  could  state 
his  position  in  a  very  few  words.  Thus,  as  he  told 
me  once,  his  speeches  were  too  short  for  the  custo- 
mary political  meeting  in  a  state  where  political  ora- 
tory flowed  on  and  on  indefinitely,  and  he  asked  the 
crowd  to  put  questions  to  him.  This  stirred  him  up, 
put  him  on  his  mettle,  stimulated  his  thought,  and  he 
was  best  at  this  short  range.  And  no  one  ever  got 
the  better  of  him.  Once  an  opponent  triumphantly 
demanded,  in  a  campaign  in  which  Johnson's  admin- 
istration was  charged  with  extravagance : 

"Mr.  Johnson,  is  it  not  a  fact  that  under  your 
administration  the  Cleveland  workhouse  has  lost 
money  ?" 

"Yes,  sir,"  the  Mayor  replied  promptly. 

"How  do  you  explain  that?" 

"We  are  not  trying  to  make  money  in  the  Cleve- 
land workhouse,"  the  Mayor  replied  instantly,  "we 
are  trying  to  make  MEN !" 

170 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

Or  again  I  see  him,  superintending  the  tearing  up 
of  street  railway  tracks,  on  streets  where  the  fran- 
chises of  the  private  company  had  expired,  to  make 
room  for  the  rails  of  the  city  company,  calmly 
smoking  a  cigar,  and  with  a  gesture  of  his  expressive 
delicate  white  hand  waving  aside  the  latest  of  the 
many  injunctions  that  were  sued  out  against  him. 
The  battle  was  never  lost  to  him,  though  his  fol- 
lowers were  often  discouraged.  He  might  have  said 
of  court  injunctions  as  Napoleon  said  of  bullets  at 
the  battle  of  Krasnoi : 

"Bah!  They  have  been  whistling  about  our  legs 
these  forty  years !" 

But  I  see  him  best  I  think  in  the  great  hall  of  his 
home  in  Euclid  avenue,  one  short,  fat  leg  tucked  com- 
fortably under  him,  his  cigar  in  his  aristocratic 
hand,  his  friends  and  admirers  about  him.  It  was  a 
remarkable  coterie  of  brilliant  young  men.  One  of 
them  had  been  originally  an  opponent,  one  of  those 
who  heckled  him  in  the  tent,  a  fiery  young  radical 
not  long  since  a  blacklisted  mechanic  who  had  gone 
hungry  when  on  strike,  Peter  Witt,  one  of  the  most 
picturesque  personalities  in  Ohio  politics ;  he  became 
one  of  Johnson's  intimate  friends  and  strongest  sup- 
porters, and  a  splendid  speaker  on  the  stump.  He 
was  city  clerk  of  Cleveland  under  all  the  Johnson 
administrations  and  is  now  the  street  railway  com- 
missioner of  that  city  under  Mayor  Newton  D. 
Baker,  who,  as  city  solicitor,  was  another  of  the 
group  of  those  happy  days.  Mr.  Baker  was  like  a 
boy  in  appearance,  with  his  sensitive  face  and  the 
ideals  of  a  poet,  and  a  brilliant  lawyer.    He  carried 

171 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

all  the  legal  burden  of  the  long  street  railway  contro- 
versy in  Cleveland, — it  was  almost  a  civil  war — and 
did  it  all  with  such  skill  and  ability,  and  withal  with 
such  grace  and  courtesy  and  good  nature  that  he 
never  offended  his  opponents,  who  were  the  leading 
corporation  lawyers  of  the  city.  Frederic  C.  Howe 
had  been  elected  to  the  council  in  Cleveland  as  a 
Republican  from  one  of  the  most  aristocratic  wards, 
but  he  was  won  over  by  Johnson's  personality,  was 
renominated  by  Johnson  on  the  Democratic  ticket, 
afterwards  sent  to  the  state  senate  and  became  one 
of  the  foremost  men  in  the  liberal  movement  in 
America;  his  books  on  municipal  government  are 
authorities.  And  Dr.  Cooley;  he  was  a  Disciple 
preacher,  and  Johnson  placed  him  at  the  head  of  the 
department  of  charities  and  corrections,  so  that,  as 
Johnson  used  to  say,  instead  of  a  preacher  Dr. 
Cooley  became  a  minister.  It  was  delightful  to  be 
with  them  in  those  gatherings.  The  genuine  reform 
of  conditions  in  that  city  possessed  them  all  like  a 
passion;  they  were  stimulated  by  a  common  ambi- 
tion, which  was,  as  Johnson  used  to  say,  to  make 
Cleveland  a  city  set  on  a  hill,  and  though  he  was  not 
a  poet  nor  a  maker  of  phrases  everyone  instinctively 
knew  what  he  meant  when  he  spoke  of  his  city  set 
on  a  hill.  I  do  not  know  how  much  of  history  he 
had  read,  but  he  knew  intuitively  that  the  city  in 
all  ages  has  been  the  outpost  of  civilization,  and 
that  if  the  problem  of  democracy  is  to  be  solved 
at  all  it  is  to  be  solved  first  in  the  city.  That  was 
why  he  struggled  for  the  free  city,  struggled  to  make 
the  city  democratic;  he  knew  that  the  cure  for  the 

172 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

ills  of  democracy  is  not  less  democracy,  as  so  many 
were  always  preaching,  but  more  democracy.  And 
how  delighted  he  was  when  Fred  Howe  brought  out 
his  book  "The  City  the  Hope  of  Democracy."  He 
had  the  joy  of  seeing  marshaled  there  in  the  thesis 
of  a  scholar  all  the  arguments  he  had  apprehended 
but  had  never  reduced  to  terms ;  there  they  were,  all 
in  their  logical  order — and  Johnson  straightway 
sent  a  copy  of  the  book  to  every  member  of  the 
Ohio  legislature,  to  their  amazement  no  doubt,  if  not 
to  their  amusement. 

I  used  to  like  to  go  over  to  Cleveland  and  meet 
that  charming  group  Johnson  had  gathered  about 
him.  There  was  in  them  a  spirit  I  never  saw  in  such 
fullness  elsewhere;  they  were  all  working  for  the 
city,  they  thought  only  of  the  success  of  the  whole. 
They  had  the  city  sense,  a  love  of  their  town  like 
that  love  which  undergraduates  have  for  their  uni- 
versity, the  esprit  de  corps  of  the  crack  regiment. 

But  Johnson  used  to  set  me  to  work  with  the 
rest  of  them.  I  went  over  there  once  to  spend  the 
week's  end,  for  rest  and  relaxation,  and  he  had  me 
working  far  into  three  nights  on  amendments  to  the 
municipal  code.  He  had  terrible  energy,  but  it  was 
a  joy  to  work  with  him.     I  wish  I  had  gone  oftener. 

I  have  said  enough  I  hope  to  make  it  clear  that 
Tom  Johnson  was  one  of  those  mortals  who  have 
somehow  been  lifted  above  their  fellows  far  enough 
to  catch  a  vision  of  the  social  order  which  people 
generally  as  yet  do  not  see.  It  was  inevitable,  of 
course,  that  such  a  man,  especially  since  he  was  a 
rich  man,  should  have  his  motives  impugned,  and 

173 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

I  recall  now  with  what  a  confidential  chuckle  he  said 
to  me  one  time  when  he  had  been  accused  of  I  know 
not  what  vaulting  and  wicked  ambition : 

"I  am  politically  ambitious;  I  have  just  one  ambi- 
tion; I  want  to  be  the  mayor  of  a  free  city,  and  if  I 
were,  the  very  first  thing  I  should  do  would  be  to 
appoint  a  corps  of  assessors  who  couldn't  see  a 
building,  or  an  improvement;  they  would  assess  for 
taxation  nothing  but  the  value  of  the  land,  and  we 
would  try  out  the  single  tax." 

He  did  not  realize  that  ambition  of  course;  no 
one  ever  realizes  his  ambition.  But  he  did  perhaps 
more  than  any  other  man  in  America  to  make  pos- 
sible the  coming  of  the  free  city  in  this  land. 

His  struggle  for  three-cent  railway  fares  in  Cleve- 
land, which  was  but  a  roundabout  method  of  secur- 
ing municipal  ownership  in  a  state  where  the  legisla- 
ture in  those  days  would  not  permit  cities  to  own 
their  public  utilities  was  his  great  work.  He  lived 
to  see  that  successful  in  a  way,  though  not  exactly 
in  the  way  he  had  expected;  that  is  another  irony 
which  the  fates  visit  on  the  head  of  ambitious  men. 

And  yet  that  irony  of  the  fates  is  not  always, 
after  all,  unkind.  Somehow,  after  a  while,  in  the 
lengthened  perspective,  the  broadened  vision  that 
reveals  a  larger  segment  of  the  arc,  the  event  is  seen 
in  better  proportion.  It  requires  faith  in  one's 
cause  to  see  this  always,  and  Johnson  always  had 
that  faith.  I  shall  not  forget  how  when  the  people 
at  last  voted  against  him,  he  still  could  smile,  and 
say  to  me:  "The  people  are  probably  right."  It 
was  the  last  time  I  saw  him.    He  was  sick  then,  and 

174 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

dying,  and  sadly  changed ;  the  hair  that  had  been  so 
black  and  curly  that  summer  morning  long  before, 
had  grown  thin  and  white ;  the  face,  sadly  lined  with 
weariness,  was  sublimated  by  a  new  expression. 
There  was  the  same  courage  in  the  classic  profile, 
and  the  old  smile  was  there.  He  was  writing  his 
memoirs  with  a  courage  as  grim  as  that  of  General 
Grant — and  he  had  the  equanimity  of  Antoninus 
Pius.  And  on  his  countenance  there  was  the  expres- 
sion of  a  purified  ideal.  So  he  had  won ;  his  was  the 
victory  after  all. 

XXXI 

The  best  of  life,  no  doubt,  is  made  up  of  mem- 
ories, as  M.  George  Cain  says,  and  perhaps  that  is 
why  I  have  lingered  so  long  over  these  little  incidents 
of  Sam  Jones  and  Tom  Johnson.  I  have  told  them 
in  no  sort  of  related  order;  Jones  died  years  before 
Johnson;  but  somehow  they  seem  to  me  to  have  ap- 
peared simultaneously,  like  twin  stars  in  our  north- 
ern sky,  to  have  blazed  a  while  and  then  gone  out  to- 
gether. Different  as  their  personalities  were,  dif- 
ferent as  two  such  great  originals  must  have  been, 
they  were  one  in  ideal,  and  even  in  their  last  words 
they  expressed  the  vast  toil  and  strain  of  the  efforts 
they  put  forth  to  attain  it. 

"Was  it  worth  while  ?"  asked  Tom  Johnson  of  his 
friend  Newton  Baker,  a  day  or  two  before  he  died. 
And  Sam  Jones  on  that  last  day  turned  to  his  sister 
Nell,  the  noble  spirit  who  had  conducted  the  settle- 
ment work  at  Golden  Rule  House,  and  said: 

175 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

"  'He  that  endureth  to  the  end '     What  does 

it  say?" 

She  repeated  the  Scripture  to  him. 

"Say  it  in  Welsh,"  he  said,  his  thought  returning 
in  those  ultimate  moments  to  the  speech  they  had 
used  as  children.  But  before  she  could  direct  her 
mind  into  the  old  sequences,  the  end  had  come. 

At  least,  there  were  those  in  town  who  thought  it 
was  the  end.  The  stock  of  the  street  railway  com- 
pany went  up  twenty-four  points  the  next  morning, 
and  some  brokers  issued  a  letter  saying  now  that 
Jones  had  died  the  securities  of  that  enterprise  of- 
fered a  golden  investment — about  the  most  authentic 
extant  illustration,  I  suppose,  of  the  utter  contempti- 
bility  of  privilege  in  these  states.  The  politicians 
often  had  been  heard  to  say  that  when  Jones  retired 
the  nonpartizan  movement  in  Toledo  would  come  to 
an  end ;  in  their  professional  analyses  they  had  pro- 
nounced it  a  personal  following  not  governed  by 
principle,  and  that  with  the  passing  of  the  leader 
it  would  disappear  and  the  voters  become  tractable 
and  docile  partizan  automata  again.  And  now  that 
Jones  was  dead  and  one  of  their  organization,  the 
president  of  the  council,  was  to  succeed  to  the 
mayor's  office,  the  hopes  they  had  so  long  entertained 
seemed  at  last  on  the  point  of  realization.  Within  a 
few  weeks,  therefore,  an  ordinance  granting  the 
street  railway  company  a  renewal  of  its  rights  was 
passed  by  the  council. 

Then,  instantly,  the  old  spirit  flamed  anew;  there 
were  editorials,  mass  meetings,  and  all  sorts  of  pro- 
test against  the  action,  and  in  response  to  this  indig- 

176 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

nant  public  feeling,  the  acting  mayor,  Mr.  Robert 
H.  Finch,  very  courageously  vetoed  the  ordinance. 
But  the  machine  "had  the  votes,"  and  on  the  follow- 
ing Monday  night  the  council  met  to  pass  the  ordi- 
nance over  the  veto.  The  members  of  the  Repub- 
lican organization  were  there,  favored  with  seats  in 
the  office  of  the  city  clerk;  lobbyists  and  the  legal 
representatives  of  the  street  railway  company  were 
there.  The  chamber  was  crowded ;  the  hot  air  of  the 
small,  low-ceiled  room  was  charged  with  a  nervous 
tension;  there  was  in  it  an  eager  expectant  quality, 
not  unmixed  with  dread  and  fear  and  guilt.  The 
atmosphere  was  offensive  to  the  moral  sense — a  con- 
dition remarked  in  other  halls  in  this  land  when 
councils  and  legislatures  have  been  about  to  take 
action  that  was  inimical  to  the  public  good. 

But  the  machine  councilmen  bore  themselves 
jauntily  enough;  the  winddws  were  open  to  the  soft 
night  of  the  early  autumn,  and  now  and  then  some 
one  sauntered  in  nonchalance  over  to  the  windows, 
and  looked  down  into  St.  Clair  Street,  garish  in  the 
white  and  brilliant  light  of  the  electric  signs  of 
theaters,  restaurants  and  saloons.  The  theater 
crowds  were  already  going  by,  but  it  was  to  be 
noted  that  they  loitered  that  evening,  and  were  re- 
enforced  by  other  saunterers,  as  though  the  enter- 
tainment of  the  pavement  might  surpass  that  of  the 
painted  scene  within.  And  above  all  the  noises  of 
the  street,  clanged  the  gongs  of  the  street  cars  glid- 
ing by,  and,  for  the  moment,  as  a  dramatic  center  of 
the  scene,  a  squad  of  policemen  was  stationed  in  the 
lobby  of  the  council  chamber. 

177 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

This  nervous,  sinister  mood  was  somehow  abroad  in 
the  whole  city  that  night.  Mr.  Negley  D.  Cochran 
had  written  another  editorial,  published  that  evening 
in  heavy  type,  in  the  News-Bee,  calling  on  the 
citizens  to  come  out  and  protect  their  rights  in 
the  streets  of  their  city,  so  that  there  were  appre- 
hensions of  all  sorts  of  danger  and  disaster. 

The  council  proceeded  with  its  business ;  the  voice 
of  the  reading  clerk  droned  on  in  the  resolutions 
and  ordinances  that  represented  the  normal  munici- 
pal activities  of  that  hour,  and  then,  suddenly,  a 
sound  of  a  new  and  unaccustomed  sort  arose  from 
St.  Clair  Street,  the  sound  of  the  tramp  of  marching 
men.  Those  at  the  windows,  looking  out,  saw  a 
strange  spectacle — not  without  its  menace;  the 
newspaper  reporters,  some  of  them,  embellished  their 
reports  with  old  phrases  about  faces  blanching. 
Perhaps  they  did;  they  might  well  have  done  so,  for 
the  men  came  down  St.  Clair  Street  not  as  a  mob ; 
they  were  silent,  marching  in  column,  by  sets  of 
fours,  with  an  orderly  precision  and  a  discipline 
almost  military.  And  at  their  head  there  was  a  man 
whose  square,  broad  shoulders  and  firm  stride  were 
the  last  expression  of  determination.  He  wore  a 
slouch  hat,  under  which  his  gray  hair  showed;  his 
closely  trimmed  beard  was  grizzled;  he  looked,  as 
many  noted,  not  unlike  the  conventional  portraits 
of  General  Grant.  The  man  was  Mr.  Johnson 
Thurston,  and  he  was  as  grim  as  General  Grant,  as 
brave,  as  determined,  and  as  cool.  He  was  widely 
known  in  Toledo  as  a  lawyer,  however,  not  as  a 
politician;  he  had  never  been  in  politics,  indeed,  but 

178 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

he  was  in  politics  that  night,  surely,  and  destined 
to  remain  in  politics  for  years  to  come. 

He  brought  his  column  to  a  halt  under  the  win- 
dows of  the  council  chamber.  There  was  no  room 
in  that  small  chamber  for  such  a  delegation,  or 
seemingly  for  any  delegation  of  the  people,  however 
small.  Johnson  Thurston's  son  marched  beside  him 
as  an  aide,  bearing  a  soap  box — the  modern  tribune 
of  our  democracy — and  he  placed  it  on  the  pave- 
ment for  his  father.  A  street  car,  just  then  halt- 
ing, clanged  its  gong  for  the  throng  to  make  way, 
and  at  this  perfect  symbol  of  the  foe  they  were 
opposing,  Johnson  Thurston  shook  his  fist,  and 
shouted : 

"Stand  there!  The  people  are  attending  to  their 
business    to-night !" 

The  street  car  stood,  and  Johnson  Thurston 
mounted  his  soap  box,  produced  a  paper  and  read 
from  it  in  a  loud  voice  that  section  of  the  Consti- 
tution in  which  the  people  retain  to  themselves  the 
right  peaceably  to  assemble  and  petition  for  a 
redress  of  grievances.  And  this  done,  he  turned  to 
his  followers,  gave  them  a  signal,  and  there  went  up 
from  their  throats  in  perfect  unison  a  mighty  cry: 
"Let  the  franchise  alone!" 

Three  times  they  voiced  their  imperative  mandate, 
and  then,  at  a  signal,  they  wheeled  about,  and 
marched  away  in  the  excellent  order  in  which  they 
had  come.  Such  a  demonstration,  in  the  streets,  at 
night,  before  a  legislative  body,  had  it  occurred  in 
a  capital  or  in  a  metropolis,  would  have  been  his- 
toric.    At  it  was,  the  cry  that  went  up  from  those 

179 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

men  was  heard  in  the  council  chamber;  and  it  was 
destined  to  ring  through  the  town  for  the  better 
part  of  a  decade.  The  council  did  not  pass 
the  ordinance  over  the  Mayor's  veto;  half  an 
hour  later  the  councilmen  were  escorted  from  their 
chamber  by  the  police  they  had  summoned;  and  a 
sadly    shaken   body   they  were,  poor   fellows. 

Meanwhile  the  men  who  had  marched  with  Johnson 
Thurston  had  retired  to  a  vacant  storeroom  in 
Superior  Street,  three  blocks  away,  over  the  door 
of  which  there  was  a  canvas  sign  bearing  the  in- 
scription "Independent  Headquarters."  There 
they  had  assembled  and  been  drilled  by  Johnson 
Thurston,  as  college  men  are  drilled  by  a  leader  in 
their  yells,  and  with  a  solemn  sense  of  civic  duty  they 
had  marched  to  the  council  chamber  to  save  their 
city  from  a  quarter  of  a  century  more  of  shameful 
vassalage  to  a  privileged  public  utility  corporation. 
The  threat  of  their  presence  had  been  sufficient,  but 
had  that  proved  unavailing,  they  had  provided  other 
resources.  There  had  been  all  the  while,  from  the 
hour  of  the  opening  of  the  doors  that  night,  twelve 
men  in  the  council  chamber,  armed  with  bombs,  not 
of  dynamite  or  any  such  anarchist  explosive,  but 
of  asafoetida  and  sulphureted  hydrogen  and  I  know 
not  what  other  overpowering  fumes  and  odors,  confi- 
dently relied  upon  to  prevail  against  even  so  foul 
a  stench  as  that  which  a  privileged  plutocracy  can 
make  in  any  of  the  halls  of  government  when  it  has 
determined  to  secure  another  lease  of  its  tenure. 

At  Independent  Headquarters,  then,  that  autumn, 
political  meetings  were  held,  in  which  local  affairs — 

180 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

the  street  car  situation  especially  and  the  relation 
it  bore  to  the  machines  of  political  parties — were 
discussed.  Because  of  those  changes  the  legislature 
was  always  making  in  the  government  of  cities,  three 
councilmen  at  large  were  to  be  elected.  This  was, 
in  the  year  1904,  in  the  midst  of  a  national  cam- 
paign. Roosevelt  was  running  for  president  for  his 
second — or  his  first  term,  depending  on  the  point 
of  view — and  three  of  those  men  who  had  voted  for 
that  street  railway  ordinance,  and  were  ready  to 
vote  to  pass  it  over  the  mayor's  veto,  were  candi- 
dates on  the  Republican  ticket  for  councilmen  at 
large.  The  Independents  who  had  marched  with 
Johnson  Thurston  determined  to  nominate  a  city 
ticket,  and  they  honored  me  by  offering  me  the  place 
at  the  head  of  that  ticket  as  their  candidate  for 
councilman  at  large.  I  was  writing  another  novel 
just  then  and  battling  as  usual  against  interrup- 
tions, and  so  I  begged  off;  it  was  not  the  campaign 
I  feared,  but,  as  I  told  them,  the  fear  that  I  should 
be  elected.  We  nominated  a  ticket,  and  went  into 
the  campaign,  speaking  every  night,  and  in  Novem- 
ber, though  Roosevelt  carried  the  city  by  fifteen 
thousand,  our  candidates  for  councilmen  at  large 
were  elected.  Clearly,  then,  the  nonpartizan  move- 
ment had  not  wholly  died  with  Golden  Rule  Jones ; 
his  soul,  like  the  soul  of  John  Brown,  was  marching 
on,  and  still  somehow  led  by  him,  and  inspired  by 
his  spirit,  there  had  sprung  forth,  like  Greek  sol- 
diers from  the  dragon's  teeth,  in  Toledo  a  demo- 
cratic municipal  movement.  First  of  all  the  cities 
in  America,  she  had  taken  the  initial  step  in  freeing 

181 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

herself,  the  step  all  cities  in  America  must  take  if 
they  would  free  themselves  from  their  masters — 
that  of  nonpartizan  municipal  elections. 

XXXII 

The  predilection  of  the  Ohio  man  for  politics,  I 
believe,  is  well  known  in  this  land,  where  it  is  gen- 
erally identified  with  a  love  for  office.  There  is  a 
reproach  implied  in  the  reputation  which  we  per- 
haps deserve.  An  Ohio  man  goes  into  politics  as 
naturally  as  a  Nova  Scotian  goes  to  sea,  and  yet 
not  all  Nova  Scotians  go  to  sea.  They  all  love  the 
sea  perhaps,  but  they  do  not  all  care  to  become 
sailors.  And  so  with  us  Ohioans.  We  all  love  poli- 
tics, though  fortunately  we  do  not  all  care  to  hold 
office,  even  if  most  people  do  smile  indulgently  when 
the  modest  disinclination  is  expressed.  Perhaps  such 
scepticism  is  quite  natural  in  a  land  so  saturated  in 
privilege  that  even  office  holding  is  regarded  in  that 
light — or  was  until  recently,  for  now  a  new  concep- 
tion is  expanding  in  the  public  consciousness  and 
there  is  hope  that  ere  long  public  office  will  be  re- 
garded as  a  responsibility.  I  was  quite  sure  that 
I  did  not  care  to  be  a  councilman — that  weekly 
wrangle,  by  night,  in  a  room  choking  with  the  fumes 
of  cheap  tobacco,  known  as  the  session  of  the  com- 
mon council,  was  far  from  my  tastes.  And  when 
the  mayoralty  was  suggested  to  me  I  was  quite  as 
certain  that  I  did  not  wish  that.  For  it  was  not 
long  after  the  death  of  Jones  that  it  was  suggested ; 
by  Tom  Johnson  for  one,  who,  in  his  blunt  way,  told 

182 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

me  that  I  should  run  for  the  place ;  and  by  Steffens, 
who,  just  then  in  Cleveland,  was  writing  the  article 
in  which  Tom  Johnson  was  celebrated  as  "the  best 
mayor  of  the  best  governed  city  in  America,"  and 
Steffens  found  time  now  and  then  to  come  over  to 
Toledo  to  see  us.  "And  another  thing,"  he  wrote  to 
me  after  one  of  these  visits,  "you'll  have  to  run  for 
mayor."  He  reached  this  conclusion,  I  believe,  by  a 
process  of  inversion.  He  had  been  talking  with  some 
of  the  machine  politicians,  and  it  was  their  objection 
to  me  as  a  candidate  that  caused  him  to  see  my  duty 
in  that  light.  I  was  at  one  with  them  on  that  point, 
at  any  rate ;  they  could  have  been  no  more  reluctant 
to  have  me  run  than  I  myself  was.  Tom  Johnson, 
when  the  Democrats  met  in  their  state  convention 
at  Columbus  that  year,  might  propose  me  for  gov- 
ernor, and  the  delegation  of  his  county,  Cuyahoga, 
and  the  delegation  from  my  own  county  of  Lucas 
vote  for  my  nomination,  but  that  stroke  of  political 
lightning  was  easily  arrested  by  rods  that  had  been 
more  accurately  and  carefully  adjusted,  so  that  I 
could  take  the  manuscript  of  "The  Turn  of  the  Bal- 
ance" and  go  to  Wequetonsing  on  the  shores  of  Lit- 
tle Traverse  Bay,  where  the  days  are  blue  and  gold, 
and  there  is  sparkling  sunshine,  and  a  golf  links 
where  one  may  find  happiness,  if  he  is  on  his  game,  or 
if  he  is  not,  consolation  in  that  noble  view  from  the 
hill — the  tee  at  the  old  fourth  and  the  new  twelfth 
hole — when  he  may,  if  he  wish,  imagine  himself  in 
Italy  overlooking  the  Bay  of  Naples — which  is  no 
more  beautiful.  Meredith  Nicholson,  a  hale  old 
Hoosier  friend,  as  James  Whitcomb  Riley  used  to 

183 


FORTY   YEARS    OF   IT 

phrase  it,  was  there,  too,  near  the  spot  where  he 
wrote  that  excellent  novel,  "The  Main  Chance,"  and 
in  that  country  place  with  him  and  other  charming 
friends  near  by  I  spent  the  summer.  But  when  I 
came  home  in  the  autumn  the  campaign  was  already 
on,  and  the  Independents  had  all  but  nominated  me 
as  their  candidate  for  mayor. 

They  were  forced  to  make  their  nominations  by 
petition,  and  on  the  petitions  proposing  me  for  the 
office  there  were  many  thousands  of  names,  pages 
that  were  stained  with  the  grime  and  dust  and  grease 
of  factories  and  shops — a  diploma  in  its  way,  which 
might  have  made  one  proud,  had  not  the  prospect 
been  one  to  make  one  so  very  unhappy.  For  I 
knew  what  the  mayoralty  had  done  to  Jones.  I  had 
come  to  realize  in  my  association  with  him  that  there 
is  no  position  more  difficult  than  that  of  the  mayor 
of  a  large  city  in  the  America  of  our  times,  for  the 
city  is  a  kind  of  microcosm  where  are  posited  in 
miniature  all  the  problems  of  a  democracy,  and  the 
fact  that  they  are  in  miniature  only  increases  the 
difficulty.  My  ambitions  lay  in  another  field,  and 
besides  I  had  a  feeling  against  it,  dim  and  vague, 
though  since  adequately  expressed  in  one  of  those  fine 
generalizations  which  Senor  Guglielmo  Ferrero 
makes  on  his  brilliant  page;  "there  is  no  sphere  of 
activity,"  he  says,  writing  of  the  perils  of  political 
life,  "which  is  so  much  at  the  mercy  of  unforeseen 
accidents  or  where  the  effort  put  out  is  so  incommen- 
surable with  the  result  obtained."  It  is,  of  course, 
one  of  the  privileges  of  the  citizen  in  a  democracy 
to  be  "mentioned"  for  public  office;  if  no  one  else 

184 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

mentions  him  he  can  mention  himself,  and  whenever 
some  one  else  does  mention  him  there  are  many  who 
ascribe  to  his  originality  the  credit  for  the  sugges- 
tion. 

It  seems  difficult  for  our  people  to  understand  any 
man  who  really  does  not  desire  public  office  in  a 
land  where  it  has  so  long  been  regarded  purely  as 
a  privilege  to  be  bestowed  or  a  prize  to  be  contested. 
I  suppose  that  even  the  blunt  and  grim  old  warrior 
Sherman  caused  the  people  to  smile  when  he  said 
that  if  nominated  for  the  presidency  he  would  not 
accept  and  if  elected  he  would  not  serve.  They 
wondered  what  he  meant,  and  for  a  time  it  never  oc- 
curred to  them  that  he  meant  just  what  he  said. 

But  the  day  came  at  last  when  I  must  decide, 
and  to  a  committee  of  the  Independents  I  said  that  I 
should  give  them  an  answer  in  the  morning.  I 
thought  it  all  over  again  in  the  watches  of  the  night, 
— and  the  unfinished  manuscript  on  my  library  table 
— and  at  last,  since  somebody  had  to  do  it,  since 
somebody  had  to  point  out  at  least  the  danger  of 
risking  the  community  rights  in  the  hands  of  a  po- 
litical machine,  I  said  I  would  accept.  I  suppose 
that  it  is  but  an  expression  of  that  ironic  mood  in 
which  the  Fates  delight  to  deal  with  mortals  that  it 
should  be  so  easy  to  get  that  which  one  does  not 
want;  the  Independents  insisted  on  my  standing  for 
the  office,  but  the  only  humor  in  that  fact  was  just 
then  too  grim  for  pleasure,  though  there  is  always  a 
compensation  somewhere  after  all,  and  gloomy  as  I 
was  that  morning  at  the  prospect  of  the  bitter  cam- 
paign and  the  difficulties  that  would  follow  if  I  were 

185 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

elected,  I  could  laugh  when  "Dad"  McCullough,  the 
old  Scotsman  whom  we  all  loved  for  himself  and  for 
his  devotion  to  our  movement,  leaned  forward  in  his 
chair,  stroked  his  whiskers  in  a  mollifying  way  and, 
as  though  he  preferred  even  the  other  members  of 
his  committee  not  to  hear  him,  said: 

"Would  it  be  out  of  place  if  I  suggested  that  in 
the  campaign  you  bear  down  as  lightly  as  possible 
on  the  infirmities  of  the  law?" 

His  shrewd  sense  even  then  warned  him  of  the 
herring  that  would  be  drawn  across  the  trail  of 
privilege  as  soon  as  we  struck  it! 

And  he  was  right.  We  had  not  opened  our  cam- 
paign at  Golden  Rule  Hall,  before  privilege  did 
what  it  always  does  when  it  is  pursued,  it  tried  to 
divert  attention  from  itself  by  pointing  out  a  smaller 
evil.  All  the  old  and  conventional  complaints  about 
the  morals  of  the  city  to  which  we  had  been  used 
in  Jones's  campaigns  were  revived  and  repeated  with 
embellishments  and  improvements;  no  city  was  ever 
reviled  as  was  ours  by  those  who  had  failed  in  their 
efforts  to  control  it  and  absorb  the  product  of  its 
communal  toil.  My  attitude,  conceived  by  "Dad" 
McCullough  as  "bearing  down  on  the  infirmities  of 
the  law,"  was  now  represented  as  evidence  of  an  in- 
tention to  ignore  the  law,  to  enforce  none  of  the 
statutes,  and  it  was  predicted  that  the  election  of 
the  Independent  ticket  meant  nothing  but  anarchy 
and  chaos. 

To  this  "moral"  issue  that  had  served  for  so 
many  years,  the  "good"  people  responded  im- 
mediately,   as    they    always    do,    and    with    certain 

186 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

of  the  clergy  to  lead  them  rallied  instantly  about 
the  machine,  and  for  six  weeks  reveled  in  an 
inspection  of  all  the  city's  vices,  and  mouseled  in 
the  slums  and  stews  of  the  tenderloin  for  examples 
of  the  depravity  which  they  declared  it  was  the  pur- 
pose and  design  of  the  Independents  to  intensify 
and  perpetuate.  Their  own  candidate  had  been  in 
power  for  a  year  and  a  half  and  these  conditions 
had  existed  unmolested,  but  when  some  of  our  speak- 
ers indicated  this  inconsistency  in  their  attitude  they 
only  raged  the  more. 

But  notwithstanding  all  this,  the  issue  was  clear; 
the  machine  had  helped  to  make  it  clear,  not  only 
by  its  long  opposition  to  Jones,  but  more  recently 
by  its  efforts  for  the  street  railway  company.  It 
was  the  old  issue  between  privilege  and  democracy, 
that  has  marked  the  cleavage  in  society  in  all  ages. 
The  people  were  trying  to  take  back  their  own  gov- 
ernment, for  the  purpose,  first,  of  preventing  the 
street  railway  company  from  securing  another  lease 
of  the  city's  streets  for  a  quarter  of  a  century,  by 
which,  incidentally,  the  company  would  realize  prof- 
its on  about  twenty-five  million  dollars  of  watered 
stock.  But  the  people  were  not  to  be  deceived ;  they 
were  not  to  be  turned  off  the  trail  so  easily ;  and  the 
entire  ticket  was  elected,  so  that  at  the  beginning  of 
that  new  year  the  Independents  were  in  control  of 
every  branch  of  the  government,  not  only  in  the  city, 
but  in  the  county  as  well. 


187 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 


XXXIII 

I  have  spoken  of  the  Independents  as  though  they 
were  an  authentic  political  party,  when  it  was  one 
of  their  basic  principles  to  be  no  party  at  all.  They 
were  Republicans  and  Democrats  who,  in  the  reve- 
lation of  Jones's  death,  had  come  to  see  that  it  was 
the  partizan  that  was  responsible  for  the  evil  po- 
litical machines  in  American  cities;  they  saw  that 
by  dividing  themselves  arbitrarily  into  parties,  along 
national  lines,  by  voting,  almost  automatically,  their 
party  tickets,  ratifying  nominations  made  for  them 
they  knew  not  how,  they  were  but  delivering  over 
their  city  to  the  spoiler.  As  Republicans,  proud 
of  the  traditions  of  that  party,  they  had  voted 
under  the  impression  that  they  were  voting  for  Lin- 
coln; as  Democrats  they  thought  they  were  voting 
for  Jefferson,  or  at  least  for  Jackson,  but  they  had 
discovered  that  they  had  been  voting  principally  for 
the  street  railway  company  and  the  privileges  al- 
lied with  it  in  interest. 

And  more  than  all,  they  saw  that  in  the  amazing 
superstition  of  party  regularity  by  which  the  par- 
tizan mind  in  that  day  was  obsessed,  they  were  vot- 
ing for  these  interests  no  matter  which  ticket  they 
supported,  for  the  machine  was  not  only  partizan,  it 
was  bi-partizan,  and  the  great  conflict  they  waged 
at  the  polls  was  the  most  absurd  sham  battle  that 
ever  was  fought.  It  seems  almost  incredible  now 
that  men's  minds  were  ever  so  clouded,  strange  that 
they  did  not  earliei  discover  how  absurd  was  a  sys- 

188 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

tern  which,  in  order  to  enable  them  the  more  readily 
to  subjugate  themselves,  actually  printed  little  wood- 
cuts of  birds — roosters  and  eagles — at  the  heads  of 
the  tickets,  so  that  they  might  the  more  easily  and 
readily  recognize  their  masters  and  deliver  their  suf- 
frages over  to  them.  It  is  an  absurdity  that  is 
pretty  well  recognized  in  this  country  to-day,  and 
the  principle  of  separating  municipal  politics  from 
national  politics  is  all  but  established  in  law.  Mr. 
James  Bryce  had  pointed  it  out  long  before,  but 
Jones  seemed  to  be  almost  the  first  among  us  to 
recognize  it,  and  he  probably  had  not  read  from 
Mr.  Bryce;  he  deduced  the  principle  from  his 
own  experience,  and  from  his  own  consciousness,  if 
not  his  own  conscience,  perhaps  he  had  some  intima- 
tion of  it  from  the  Genius  of  These  States,  whose 
scornful  laugh  at  that  and  other  absurdities  his 
great  exemplar  Walt  Whitman  could  hear,  echoed  as 
from  some  mountain  peak  afar  in  the  west.  But  it 
was  no  laughing  matter  in  Toledo  in  those  days. 
Men  were  accused  of  treason  and  sedition  for  desert- 
ing their  parties ;  it  made  little  difference  which 
party  a  man  belonged  to;  the  insistence  was  on  his 
belonging  to  a  party;  any  party  would  suffice. 

I  have  no  intention,  however,  of  discussing  that 
principle  now,  but  it  was  the  point  from  which  we 
had  to  start  in  our  first  campaign,  the  point  from 
which  all  cities  will  have  to  start  if  they  wish  to  be 
free.  The  task  we  faced  was  relatively  greater  than 
that  which  Jones  had  faced;  we  had  a  full  ticket  in 
the  field,  a  candidate  for  every  city  office  and  a  man 
running   for   the   council   in   every   ward   in   town. 

189 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

Jones  had  run  alone,  and  though  he  succeeded  there 
was  always  a  council  and  a  coterie  of  municipal  of- 
ficials who  represented  the  other  interest  in  the  com- 
munity. Of  course  he  had  made  our  work  possible 
by  the  labor  he  had  done,  great  pioneer  that  he 
was.  He  had  been  his  own  platform,  as  any  candi- 
date after  all  must  be,  but  with  our  large  movement 
it  was  necessary  to  reduce  our  principles  to  some 
form  and  we  tried  to  do  this  as  simply  as  we  could. 
We  put  forth  our  belief  that  local  affairs  should 
be  separate  from,  and  independent  of,  party  poli- 
tics, and  that  public  officers  should  be  selected  on 
account  of  their  honesty  and  efficiency,  regardless 
of  political  affiliations ;  that  the  people  should  be 
more  active  in  selecting  their  officials,  and  should 
not  allow  an  office-seeker  to  bring  about  his  own 
nomination;  that  the  prices  charged  by  public 
service  corporations  should  be  regulated  by  the 
council  at  stated  intervals ;  and  that  all  franchises 
for  public  utilities  should  first  be  submitted  to  a 
vote  of  the  people,  that  the  city  should  possess  the 
legal  right  to  acquire  and  maintain  any  public  util- 
ity, when  authorized  so  to  do  by  direct  vote  of  its 
people,  that  every  franchise  granted  to  public  service 
corporations  should  contain  an  agreement  that  the 
city  might  purchase  and  take  over  its  property  at  a 
fair  price,  whenever  so  voted  by  the  people,  and  that 
no  street  railway  franchise  should  be  extended  or 
granted,  permitting  more  than  three-cent  fares,  and 
unless  it  includes  provision  for  universal  transfers, 
satisfactory  service,  and  reasonable  compensation 
for  the  use  of  bridges,  and  we  demanded  from  the 

190 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

legislature  home  rule,  the  initiative  and  referendum 
and  the  recall. 

Perhaps  it  was  not  such  a  little  platform  after 
all,  but  big  indeed,  I  think,  when  one  comes  to  con- 
sider its  potentialities,  and  if  anyone  thinks  it  was 
easy  to  put  its  principles  into  practice,  let  him 
try  it  and  see!  It  was  drawn  by  that  Johnson 
Thurston  of  whom  I  spoke,  and  by  Oren  Dunham 
and  by  Elisha  B.  Southard  and  others,  citizens  de- 
voted to  their  town,  and  already  with  a  prescience 
of  the  city  spirit.  They  succeeded  in  compressing 
into  those  few  lines  all  we  know  or  need  to  know 
about  municipal  government,  and  ages  hence  our 
cities  will  still  be  falling  short  of  the  ideal  they  ex- 
pressed on  that  little  card.  There  were  many  who 
went  with  us  in  that  first  campaign  who  did  not  see 
all  the  implications  of  that  statement  of  princi- 
ples; none  of  us  saw  all  of  them  of  course.  The 
movement  had  not  only  the  strength  but  the  weak- 
nesses of  all  so-called  reform  movements  in  their 
initial  stages.  Those  who  were  disappointed  or 
disaffected  or  dissatisfied  for  personal  reasons  with 
the  old  party  machines,  no  doubt  found  an  oppor- 
tunity for  expression  of  their  not  too  lofty  senti- 
ments, although  later  on  when  they  saw  that  it  was 
merely  a  tendency  toward  democracy  they  fell  away, 
not  because  the  movement  had  deserted  its  original 
ideals  but  because  they  at  last  understood  them. 

As  I  now  look  back  on  that  first  campaign,  on  the 
experience  I  had  so  much  dreaded,  the  perspective 
has  worked  its  magic,  and  the  hardships  and  diffi- 
culties have  faded  away,  even,  I  hope,  as  its  en- 

191 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

mities  have  faded  away,  though  remembering  Jones's 
admonition  to  "draw  the  sting"  I  tried  to  keep  en- 
mities out  of  it.  Since  I  could  not  bring  myself 
to  discuss  myself,  I  resolved  not  to  discuss  my  op- 
ponents, and  I  went  through  the  campaign  without 
once  mentioning  the  name  of  one  of  them — there 
were  four  candidates  for  mayor  against  me — without 
making  one  personal  reference  to  them.  And  never 
in  any  political  campaign  since  have  I  attacked  an 
opponent.  It  was  enough  to  discuss  the  principles 
of  our  little  platform;  and  the  first  task  was  to  get 
the  electors  to  see  the  absurdity  of  their  partizan- 
ship  and  to  make  clear  the  necessity  of  having  a 
city  government  that  represented  the  people  or, 
since  that  phrase  is  perhaps  indefinite,  one  that  did 
not   represent   the  privileged  interests   of  the   city. 

The  campaign  was  like  the  old  Jones  campaigns, 
though  not  altogether  like  them. 

The  legislature,  which  is  always  interfering  as 
much  as  possible  with  the  cities,  had  changed  the 
time  of  holding  the  municipal  elections  from  the 
spring  to  the  autumn,  one  change  wrought  by  a  leg- 
islature in  cities  that  the  people  approved,  since 
instead  of  those  raw  spring  winds  we  now  have  the 
glorious  weather  the  autumn  usually  brings  us  in 
the  lake  regions,  with  a  sparkling  air  and  a  warm 
sun,  and  a  long  procession  of  golden  days,  on  which 
one  really  should  be  playing  golf,  if  one  could  play 
golf  in  the  midst  of  a  political  campaign,  which 
one  could  not,  since  art  and  politics,  or  at  least  the 
practice  of  them,  are  wholly  incompatible. 

There  was  no  old  gray  Molly  to  jog  about  from 
192 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

one  meeting  to  another,  and  if  there  had  been,  she 
could  not  have  jogged  fast  enough  for  the  neces- 
sities of  that  hour;  and  we  established  new  prece- 
dents when  Percy  Jones,  the  son  of  the  Golden  Rule 
Mayor,  drove  me  about  at  furious  speed  in  his  big 
touring  car,  the  "Grey  Ghost"  the  reporters  called 
it,  and  it  streaked  through  the  night,  with  its  siren 
singing,  from  place  to  place  until  I  had  spoken  at 
half  a  dozen  meetings.  Every  day  at  noon  it  wheeled 
up  to  the  entrance  of  the  factories  and  shops  as  the 
men  were  coming  out  for  their  noon  hour.  And 
such  meetings  I  believe  were  never  held  anywhere; 
there  was  an  inspiration  as  the  men  crowded  about 
the  car  to  hear  the  speeches ;  they  were  not  poli- 
ticians, they  were  seeking  nothing,  they  were  inter- 
ested in  their  city;  and  in  their  faces,  what  is  far 
above  any  of  these  considerations,  there  was  an  eager 
interest  in  life,  perhaps  a  certain  hunger  of  life 
which  in  so  many  of  them,  such  were  the  conditions 
of  their  toil,  was  not  satisfied. 


XXXIV 

As  I  sat  and  looked  out  over  the  crowds  that 
poured  from  the  shops  and  stood,  sometimes  for  the 
whole  of  the  noon  hour,  in  discomfort  perhaps  if 
the  wind  was  off  the  lake,  and  saw  the  veritable 
hunger  for  life  that  was  in  their  faces,  a  hunger 
surely  which  no  political  or  economic  system,  how- 
ever wise  and  perfect,  could  satisfy,  I  could  not  help 
thinking  that  it  was  a  pity  the  clergy  did  not  under- 

193 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

stand  these  people  better,  for,  after  all,  the  message 
of  the  Carpenter  who  came  out  of  Nazareth  was  for 
the  workers  and  the  poor,  and  He  had  passionately 
thrown  Himself  on  their  side.  It  might  have  been 
suggested  to  that  pastor  who  complained  bitterly 
that  his  own  pews  were  empty  on  Sunday  evenings 
while  the  streets  outside  his  church  were  crowded 
with  people  who  for  one  evening  at  least  were  joy- 
ous and  free  from  care,  that  the  Master  whom  he 
served  would  have  asked  no  better  congregation  than 
they  and  no  better  auditorium  than  the  street. 

But  this  pastor  was  used  to  making  suggestions, 
not  to  receiving  them ;  he  was  not  of  a  mind  as  open 
as  that  one  who  actually  came  to  me  once  to  ask 
me  how  he  could  get  the  working  men  to  hear  him 
preach.  He  had  not  failed,  he  said,  to  go  to  them; 
he  had  advertised  on  a  placard  hung  at  the  entrance 
of  a  factory  where  two  thousand  men  were  working 
that  on  a  Monday  at  noon  he  would  speak  to  them. 
They  had  known  of  him,  for  he  had  recently  been 
celebrated  in  the  newspapers  as  having  inaugurated 
a  crusade  to  close  the  cheap  theaters,  whose  lurid 
melodramas, — I  believe  lurid  is  the  word  in  that  con- 
nection unless  the  melodramas  are  "novelized"  and 
sold  for  a  dollar  and  a  half, — he  said,  were  detri- 
mental to  morals,  as  no  doubt  they  were.  And  so 
when  he  appeared,  punctually,  on  that  Monday 
noon,  at  the  rendezvous  appointed  by  his  poster, 
the  working  men  were  ready  and,  when  he  stood  up 
to  preach  to  them,  they  received  him  with  a  deaf- 
ening din,  made  by  pounding  on  pieces  of  metal  they 
had  brought  from  the  shop,  so  that  the  poor  fel- 

194 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

low  could  not  speak  at  all,  and  when,  with  roars  of 
awful  laughter  they  unfurled  some  ribald  banner 
fresh  from  the  paint  shop  of  their  establishment, 
advising  him  to  go  to  hell  where  he  was  always  con- 
signing so  many  of  his  fellow  human  beings,  he 
went  away  quite  broken-hearted.  It  was  in  that 
mood  and  perhaps  a  little  chastened  by  his  experi- 
ence that  he  came  to  see  me.  I  could  agree  with 
him,  of  course,  that  the  men  had  acted  like  the  per- 
fect barbarians  they  could  be  at  times,  but  there 
was  nothing  I  could  do  for  him,  nothing  I  could  tell 
him.  I  learned  long  ago  that  you  cannot  tell  a  man 
anything  unless  he  knows  it  already! 

And  yet  that  preacher's  case  was  perfectly  sim- 
ple. He  had  come  to  the  city  not  long  before,  and 
of  course,  had  come  from  the  country.  His  train- 
ing and  his  experience  had  all  been  rural,  he  knew 
nothing  whatever  of  the  life  of  our  cities  or  of  their 
problems;  he  thought  only  in  agrarian  sequences. 
He  had  a  little  code  of  conduct  consisting  of  a  few 
perfectly  simple  negatives,  namely,  men  should  not 
use  tobacco,  or  liquor,  or  attend  theaters  or  cir- 
cuses, or  play  with  colored  cards,  or  violate  (that  is, 
do  anything  pleasant  on)  the  Sabbath  day.  And 
whenever  he  saw  people  doing  any  of  these  things 
it  was  his  duty  to  dissuade  them  from  doing  them, 
and  if  he  could  not  dissuade  them,  then  it  was  the 
duty  of  the  authorities  to  force  the  people  to  stop 
doing  these  things  by  sending  policemen  after  them. 
Poverty  was  caused  either  by  drink,  or  by  idleness, 
though  usually  by  drink,  and  if  the  saloons  were 
closed,  drinking  would  cease ! 

195 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

This  was  the  man's  conception.  Of  the  condition 
of  the  working  men  in  the  cities  he  had  literally  no 
notion.  He  knew  they  worked,  and  that  working 
made  them  tired,  of  course,  just  as  it  made  farmers 
tired.  He  saw  no  difference  between  the  labor  in 
the  agricultural  field  and  that  in  the  industrial  field. 
That  men  who  had  been  shut  up  in  dusty  factories 
for  six  days,  working  intently  at  whirling  machines, 
under  the  bulb  of  an  electric  light,  felt,  when  they 
came  to  the  one  day  of  rest,  that  they  should  like 
to  go  outdoors  and  breathe  the  air,  and  have  some  re- 
laxation, some  fun,  had  never  occurred  to  him.  That 
they  had  to  work  so  hard,  too,  that  stimulants  were 
perhaps  a  necessity,  never  occurred  to  him,  just  as 
it  had  never  occurred  to  him  that  when  one  of  these 
workers  left  home  there  was  no  place  for  him  to  go 
unless  he  went  to  a  saloon,  where  there  were  light 
and  warmth  and  companionship,  and,  above  all,  lib- 
erty ;  or  to  a  cheap  theatre  or  in  the  summer  to  a 
baseball  game.  And  he  could  not  understand  why 
these  men  resented  his  suggestion  that  they  give  up 
all  these  things,  and  instead  do  as  farmers  do  on 
Sunday,  or  as  they  pretend  to  do,  that  is,  stay  in- 
doors, or,  if  they  do  go  out,  go  out  to  attend  church. 

And  what  was  most  curious  of  all,  he  had  not  the 
slightest  notion  of  what  we  meant  when  we  spoke  of 
the  street  railway  problem.  He  knew,  of  course, 
that  it  was  proposed  to  reduce  the  fare  a  cent  or 
two  cents,  but  that  was  not  important;  what  were 
two  cents?  That  there  was  anything  immoral  in 
watering  stock,  in  seizing  millions  of  the  communal 
value,  had  never  occurred  to  him,  and  in  the  midst 

196 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

of  all  the  complexities  of  city  life  he  remained  ut- 
terly naive,  bound  up  in  his  little  code,  with  not 
the  glimmer  of  a  ray  of  light  on  social  conditions 
or  problems,  or  of  economics,  or,  in  a  word,  of  life. 
To  him  there  were  no  social  problems  that  the  Anti- 
Saloon  League  could  not  solve  in  a  week,  if  wicked 
officials  would  only  give  them  enough  policemen  and 
a  free  rein  to  do  it. 

And  so  he  wondered  why  the  working  men  would 
not  come  to  hear  him  preach,  or  at  least  would  not 
listen  to  him  at  the  door  of  their  shop! 

And  most  of  the  parsons  in  the  town — at  that 
time,  though  it  is  not  so  any  more,  so  rapidly  have 
changes  come  in  our  thought — were  of  this  frame  of 
mind.  Not  one  of  them  supported  our  cause;  many 
of  them  denounced  it,  and  continued  to  denounce 
it,  for  years.  Now  and  then  there  was  one  who 
might  whisper  to  me  privately  that  he  understood 
and  favored  our  efforts,  but  not  one  ever  spoke  out 
publicly,  unless  it  were  to  denounce  us.  And  several 
times  they  attacked  me  in  their  prayers.  For  in- 
stance, if — after  I  became  mayor — I  went  to  de- 
liver an  address  of  welcome,  and  a  preacher  was 
there  to  open  the  assembly  with  prayer,  he  some- 
times would  take  advantage  of  the  situation  and,  in 
the  pretense  of  asking  a  blessing  on  the  "chief  mag- 
istrate of  our  beloved  city,"  point  out  my  short- 
comings and  read  me  a  lecture  on  my  duties  with 
his  eyes  shut  and  his  hands  folded.  To  that  attack 
it  would  have  been  necessary,  I  presume,  though  I 
am  not  quite  sure  of  the  ecclesiastical  etiquette,  to 
reply  with  my  eyes  shut  and  my  hands  folded,  but 

197 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

Jones  had  said:  "When  He  was  reviled,  He  reviled 
not  again,"  and  "He  that  endureth  to  the  end."  It 
seemed  as  good  a  plan  as  any.  I  never  replied  to 
these  or  any  other  of  their  attacks.  Some  of  the 
leaders  of  our  movement  always  insisted  that  the 
preachers  opposed  us  because  they  were  influenced, 
according  to  the  historical  precedents,  by  their  eco- 
nomic dependence  on  the  privileged  class.  But  if 
that  is  true  I  am  sure  the  influence  was  unconscious 
in  most  cases,  and  that  they  simply  did  not  under- 
stand. They  were  all  desperately  sincere.  That 
was  the  chief  difficulty  with  them. 

Indeed,  I  found  it  better  never  to  reply  to  any 
criticisms  or  attacks  whatever.  The  philosophy  of 
that  attitude  has  been  pretty  well  set  forth  I  think 
by  Emerson,  though  it  has  been  so  long  since  I  have 
read  it  that  I  do  not  now  know  in  which  of  his  essays 
or  his  poems  or  his  lectures  he  revealed  it,  though 
probably  it  would  be  found  in  all  three  since,  shrewd 
Yankee  that  he  was,  he  cast  every  thought  he  had 
in  three  forms.  Had  he  lived  in  our  day  he  might 
in  addition  have  dramatized  each  one  of  them.  But 
from  his  advice  never  to  apologize,  one  may  proceed 
to  the  virtue  of  never  explaining.  It  saves  an  im- 
mense amount  of  time  and  energy,  for  since  a  poli- 
tician's enemies  are  legion,  and  are  constantly  in- 
creasing in  number,  and  can  attack  him,  as  it  were, 
in  relays,  he  must  have  enormous  energy  if  he  is  to 
reply  in  detail  to  all  of  them;  he  will  find  himself 
after  a  while  more  desperately  involved  than  was  the 
man  in  Kipling's  story,  who  through  the  Indian  Gov- 
ernment kept  his  enemy  toiling  night  and  day  to  an- 

198 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

swer  foolish  questions  about  pigs,  and,  what  was 
worse,  explaining  his  previous  answers. 

Telling  what  one  is  going  to  do  is  equally  as 
foolish  as  explaining  what  one  has  done,  or  denying 
what  one  has  not  done,  and  so  promises  could  be 
dispensed  with  as  easily  as  retorts  and  explanations. 
Long  catalogues  of  promised  prodigies  and  mira- 
cles are  of  course  absurd,  and  the  bawling  and  blow- 
ing politician  (as  Walt  Whitman  called  him)  can 
make  them  as  fluently  in  his  evil  cause  as  can  the 
purest  of  the  reformers.  I  had  been  disgusted  too 
often  with  such  performances  to  be  able  to  enter 
into  competition  of  that  sort,  and  so  let  our  little 
platform  speak  for  itself  and  did  not  even  promise 
to  be  good.     And  the  people  understood. 

I  have  often  heard  men  complain  of  the  strain 
and  fatigue  of  political  campaigning,  and  I  some- 
times think  much  of  their  distress  arises  from  the 
fact  that  they  campaign  in  ways  that  are  not  neces- 
sary, if  nothing  more  derogatory  is  to  be  said  of 
them.  There  is  of  course  the  fatigue  that  comes 
of  nervous  strain  and  anxiety,  and  this  is  very  great, 
but  the  haggard  visage  and  the  husky  voice  are  all 
unnecessary.  It  is  no  wonder  to  be  sure  that  some 
men  break  down  in  campaigns,  since  their  cause 
is  so  bad  that  anyone  might  well  be  expected  to 
sicken  in  its  advocacy,  and  in  furthering  it  it  is 
perhaps  inevitable  that  their  efforts  partake  in  a 
measure  of  its  corruption.  There  is  no  exercise  that 
is  physically  more  beneficial  than  speaking,  espe- 
cially speaking  in  the  open  air,  provided  one  knows 
how  to  use  his  voice  and  does  not  attempt  to  shout 

199 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

up  the  wind;  and  two  or  three  speeches  at  noon,  just 
before  luncheon  and  four  or  five  more  in  the  even- 
ing after  dinner  may  be  recommended  as  an  excellent 
course  in  physical  culture,  if  when  one  is  done  one's 
speeches  for  the  evening  one  will  go  home  and,  for 
an  hour,  read,  say  "Huckleberry  Finn"  or  "Tom 
Sawyer"  before  he  goes  to  bed.  I  can  recommend 
these  two  great  American  novels  with  entire  confi- 
dence in  their  power  to  refresh,  and  in  their  deep 
and  true  and  delightful  philosophy  to  correct  aber- 
rations in  the  point  of  view — of  one's  self,  in  the 
first  place,  and  of  some  other  things  of  much  more 
importance  than  one's  self.  If  the  cause  be  one  in 
which  one  believes  there  is  an  incomparable  exhil- 
aration in  it  all.  And  it  was  with  some  pride  that  I 
came  through  that  first  campaign  without  having 
lost  either  my  temper  or  my  voice. 

There  must  always  remain  the  memory  of  those 
throngs  in  the  meetings,  those  working  men  who 
came  pouring  out  of  the  shops  and  factories  at  noon, 
glad  as  school  boys  to  be  released  for  a  little  while 
from  toil,  laughing,  whistling,  engaging  in  rude 
pleasantries,  jostling,  teasing  and  joking  each 
other,  and  then,  suddenly,  pausing,  gathering  about 
the  motor  car,  drawing  closer,  pressing  up  to 
the  foot-board,  and  listening,  with  eager,  intent 
faces,  in  which  there  was  such  instant  appreciation 
of  a  joke,  a  pleasantry,  anything  to  make  them 
laugh,  and  yet  somehow  the  adumbration  of  a  yearn- 
ing and  a  hope.  Lyman  Wachenheimer — who  as 
judge  of  the  police  court  once  had  fined  Jones  for 
contempt  of  court,  but  had  come  later  to  agree  with 

200 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

him  and  now  was  candidate  for  prosecuting  attor- 
ney of  the  county — would  stand  up  in  the  car,  lean 
over,  and  speak  to  them  out  of  the  splendid  new 
faith  in  democracy  that  had  come  to  him,  and  the 
rest  of  us  in  our  turn  would  speak.  We  did  not 
ask  them  to  vote  for  us;  our  message  was  at  least 
higher  than  that  old  foolish  and  selfish  appeal.  First 
of  all  we  wished  them  to  vote  for  themselves,  we 
wished  them  to  vote  their  own  convictions,  and  not 
merely  to  follow  with  the  old  partizan  blindness  the 
boss  or  the  employer  or  someone  else  who  told 
them  how  to  vote.  And  all  too  soon  for  the  orators 
warming  to  their  work — they  must  speak  rapidly, 
they  must  speak  simply  and  come  to  the  point,  for 
the  demands  of  the  street  meeting  are  obdurate 
and  out  under  the  open  sky  there  is  short  shrift  for 
insincerity  or  any  of  the  old  pretense  and  buncombe 
— the  whistle  blows,  the  men  turn  and  scatter,  the 
crowd  melts  away,  a  few  linger  to  the  last  minute 
to  catch  the  last  word,  and  then  they  turn  and  run, 
and   as   they   go   they   lift   high   the   perpendicular 

hand — Walt  Whitman's  sign  of  democracy 

Do  you  know  it?  Sometimes  one  of  the  section  gang 
working  on  the  railroad,  pausing  in  his  labor  while 
the  Limited  sweeps  by,  looks  up  and  to  the  idle  one 
on  the  rear  platform  of  the  observation  car,  going 
for  his  long  holiday,  he  waves  his  hand  in  a  gesture- 
instinct  with  grace  and  the  sincere  greeting  of  a 
fellow  human  being,  and  perhaps  because — alas ! — 
the  moment  of  their  swift  and  instantly  passing  com- 
munication is  isolated  from  all  the  complexities  of 
our  civilized  life,  because  it  is  to  vanish  too  soon 

201 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

for  the  differences  men  have  made  between  them- 
selves to  assert  their  distinction,  there  is  that  one 
instant  of  perfect  understanding.  Sometimes  a  man 
in  a  boat  sailing  by  will  hail  you  with  this  gesture 
from  his  passing  craft ;  he  is  safe  from  long  contact, 
he  can  run  a  risk  and  for  that  little  moment  yield 
to  the  adventure  of  picking  up  an  acquaintance. 
Sometimes  it  is  the  engineer  of  a  locomotive  lean- 
ing out  of  his  cab  window,  giving  you  perhaps  a 
droll  wink,  and  there  are  tramps  who  from  a  box 
car  will  exchange  a  friendly  greeting.  And  I  shall 
never  forget  the  little  Irish  sailor  up  on  the  boat 
deck  with  whom  I  talked  in  the  early  darkness  of  an 
autumn  evening  in  the  middle  of  the  Atlantic,  with 
the  appalling  loneliness  of  the  sea  as  night  came 
down  to  meet  it  in  mystery,  and  the  smoke  from  the 
funnels  trailed  up  off  to  the  southwest  on  a  rising 
and  sinister  wind;  he  told  me  of  his  mother  and  his 
uncle — "who  makes  his  five  guineas  a  week  and 
doesn't  know  the  taste  of  liquor" — and  of  his  little 
ambitions,  and  so,  after  a  bit,  of  the  mysteries  of 
life,  with  a  perfect  camaraderie,  as  we  stood  there 
leaning  over  the  rail,  and  then,  suddenly,  when  we 
parted,  invested  himself  with  a  wholly  different  man- 
ner, and  touched  his  cap  in  a  little  salute  and  left  me 
to  the  inanities  of  the  smoking-room. 

It  was  something  like  that,  those  intimacies, 
vouchsafed  for  a  moment  in  our  early  meetings, 
whether  those  at  noon  or  those  at  night,  in  the  suf- 
focating little  halls,  or  the  cold  tent,  with  the  torches 
tossing  their  flames  in  your  eyes  as  you  spoke,  and 
it  was  even  that  way  in  those  curious  meetings  down 

202 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

in  the  darker  quarter  of  the  town,  where  the  waste  of 
the  city  lifted  up  faces  that  were  seared  and  scarred 
with  the  appalling  catastrophes  of  the  soul  that  had 
somehow  befallen  them,  and  there  was  unutterable 
longing  there. 

The  one  thing  that  marred  these  contacts  was 
not  only  that  one  was  so  powerless  to  help  these  men, 
but  that  one  stood  before  them  in  an  attitude  that 
somehow  suggested  to  them,  inevitably,  from  long 
habit  and  the  pretense  of  men  who  sought  power  for 
themselves,  that  one  needed  only  to  be  placed  in  a 
certain  official  relation  to  them,  and  to  be  addressed 
by  a  certain  title,  to  be  able  to  help  them.  It  was 
enough  to  make  one  ashamed,  almost  enough  to  cause 
one  to  prefer  that  they  should  vote  for  someone  else, 
and  relieve  one  from  this  dreadful  self-consciousness, 
this  dreadful  responsibility. 

And  these  were  the  people !  These  were  they  who 
had  been  so  long  proscribed  and  exploited;  they 
had  borne  a  few  of  the  favored  of  the  fates  on  their 
backs,  and  yet,  bewildered,  they  were  somehow  ex- 
pectant of  that  good  to  come  to  them  which  had 
been  promised  in  the  words  and  phrases  by  which 
their  very  acquiescence  and  subjugation  had  so  mys- 
teriously been  wrought — "Life,  liberty  and  the  pur- 
suit of  happiness." 

Where?  And  for  them,  when?  Not  through  the 
efforts  of  those  who  employed  cold  phrases  about 
"good"  government,  and  "reform,"  and  "business" 
administrations,  and  efficiency  methods,  and  enforce- 
ment of  the  laws,  and  law  and  order,  and  all  that 
sort    of   thing,    and   class   consciousness,   and   eco- 

203 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

nomic,  or  any  other  interpretation  of  history,  or 
through  initiatives,  referendums  and  recalls.  What 
good  would  any  of  these  cold  and  precise  formulae 
do  them?  Better  perhaps  the  turkey  at  Thanks- 
giving, and  the  goose  at  Christmas  time  which  the 
old  machine  councilman  from  the  ward  gave  them; 
of  course  they  themselves  paid  for  them,  but  they 
did  not  know  it,  and  the  councilman  did  not  know  it ; 
he  had  bestowed  them  with  the  voice  of  kindness, 
in  the  same  hearty  human  spirit  in  which  he  came 
to  the  wedding  or  the  wake,  or  got  the  father  a 
job,  or  the  oldest  son  a  parole  from  the  workhouse, 
and  rendered  a  thousand  other  little  personal  serv- 
ices. Perhaps  Bath  House  John  and  Hinky  Dink 
were  more  nearly  right  after  all  than  the  cold  and 
formal  and  precise  gentleman  who  denounced  their 
records  in  the  council.  For  they  were  human,  and 
the  great  problem  is  to  make  the  government  of  a 
city  human. 

There  were  many,  of  course,  even  in  our  own 
movement,  who  were  not  concerned  about  that ;  I  was 
strongly  rebuked  by  one  of  them  once  in  that  very 
first  campaign  for  declaring  that  we  were  no  better 
than  anyone  else,  and  that  all  the  "good"  men  of 
the  world  could  not  do  the  people  much  good  even  if 
they  were  elected  to  the  city  government  for  life.  No, 
we  may  have  efficient  governments  in  our  cities,  and 
honest  governments,  as  we  are  beginning  to  have 
everywhere,  and,  happily,  are  more  and  more  to 
have,  but  the  great  emancipations  will  not  come 
through  the  formulae  of  Independents,  Socialists,  or 
single-taxers,  nor  through  Law  and  Order  Leagues, 

204 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

nor  Civic  Associations.  Down  in  their  hearts  these 
are  not  what  the  people  want.  What  they  want  is  a 
life  that  is  fuller,  more  beautiful,  more  splendid  and, 
above  all,  more  human.  And  nobody  can  prepare  it 
and  hand  it  over  to  them.  They  must  get  it  them- 
selves; it  must  come  up  through  them  and  out  of 
them,  through  long  and  toilsome  processes  of  devel- 
opment; for  such  is  democracy. 

"That  man's  program  will  take  a  thousand 
years !"  Lincoln  Steffens  had  said  in  despair  that 
day  I  introduced  him  to  Jones.  Yes — or  a  hun- 
dred thousand.    But  there  is  no  other  way. 


XXXV 

The  most  efficient  executive  of  which  there  is  any 
record  in  history  is  clearly  that  little  centurion 
who  could  say:  "For  I  also  am  a  man  set  under 
authority,  having  under  me  soldiers ;  and  I  say  unto 
one,  go,  and  he  goeth;  and  to  another,  come,  and 
he  cometh ;  and  to  my  servant,  do  this,  and  he  doeth 
it." 

In  my  experience  as  an  executive  I  learned  that 
it  was  easy  to  say  "Go,"  but  that  the  fellows  did  not 
go  promptly;  I  could  say  "Come,"  and  he  came — 
after  a  while,  perhaps,  when  I  had  said  "Come" 
again,  and  that  sometimes,  having  said  "Do  this,"  I 
had  to  go  myself  and  do  it,  or  leave  it  undone. 

Executive  ability  is  a  mysterious  quality  inhering 
in  personality,  and  partaking  of  its  mysteries. 

I  had  gone  into  the  mayor's  office  feeling  that  I 
205 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

was  about  the  most  ill-prepared  man  for  such  a  job 
in  the  town.  Naturally  I  had  turned  to  Tom  John- 
son, who  had  a  tremendous  reputation  as  an  execu- 
tive; even  his  worst  enemy,  as  the  saying  is,  would 
not  deny  his  wonderful  executive  ability.  I  went 
to  him  in  a  sort  of  despair,  and  he  laughed  and 
leaned  over  and  whispered 

But  perhaps  after  all  I  should  not  tell.  It  was 
spoken  in  confidence.  And  it  is  ungenerous  and  un- 
kind to  destroy  the  cherished  illusions  of  the  world, 
almost  as  unkind,  I  was  about  to  say,  as  it  is  diffi- 
cult, since  there  is  nothing  the  world  so  cherishes 
and  hugs  to  its  sad  old  withered  bosom  as  it  does 
its  illusions.  It  may  be  that  they  are  entirely  neces- 
sary to  it,  it  may  be  that  it  could  not  get  along 
without  them.  What  would  this  nation  have  done, 
after  all,  if  it  had  not  been  for  executive  ability  and 
the  judicial  temperament?  The  judicial  tempera- 
ment consists,  of  course,  in  nothing  more  than  the 
calm  assurance  which  enables  one  to  put  off  till  to- 
morrow problems  that  should  be  decided  to-day,  for 
if  allowed  to  go  long  enough  problems  will  solve 
themselves,  jusc  as  letters  unanswered  long  enough 
despatch  their  own  replies. 

I  had  deduced  that  generalization  for  myself 
long  ago,  while  waiting  for  judges  to  hand  down 
opinions,  and  then  in  decisions  reading  the  well- 
known  formula:  "The  court  does  not  find  it  neces- 
sary to  pass  on  this  particular  point  at  this  time." 
Why,  I  applied  one  time  to  the  Supreme  Court,  on 
a  Wednesday  morning,  for  a  stay  of  execution  on 
behalf  of  a  man  who  was  to  be  burned  alive  in  our 

206 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

electric  chair  on  the  following  Friday,  and  the  ju- 
dicial temperament  who  at  that  time  happened  to 
be  chief  justice  calmly  said  that  the  application 
would  be  taken  under  advisement  and  a  decision 
handed  down  in  due  course,  which,  at  the  earliest, 
was  the  following  Tuesday  morning.  But  the  gov- 
ernor half  an  hour  afterward  said,  "Oh,  well,  don't 
worry;  if  the  court  doesn't  act,  I'll  reprieve  him," 
an  example,  perhaps,  of  what  I  had  in  mind  when 
I  was  writing  those  vague  thoughts  about  making 
government  human.  But  executive  ability !  I  had, 
and  still  have,  great  admiration  and  reverence  for 
that 

But  Tom  Johnson  leaned  over  that  afternoon,  as 
we  sat  there  in  the  committee  room  of  the  House 
at  Columbus,  and  laughed  and  whispered: 

"It's  the  simplest  thing  in  the  world ;  decide  every 
question  quickly  and  be  right  half  the  time.  And 
get  somebody  who  can  do  the  work.  That's  all 
there  is  to  executive  ability." 

I  looked  at  him  in  amazement.  He  had  grown 
quite  serious. 

"There's  another  thing,"  he  added.  "Don't  spend 
too  much  time  in  your  office.  A  quarter  of  an  hour 
each  day  is  generally  too  long,  unless  there  are  a 
whole  lot  of  letters.  Of  course,"  he  went  on  reflec- 
tively, "you  can  get  clerks  who  can  sign  your  name 
better  than  you  can." 


207 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 


XXXVI 

The  first  thing  was  to  get  men  who  could  do  the 
work,  a  difficulty  made  greater  because  we  have  been 
accustomed  to  bestow  public  offices  as  rewards  for  po- 
litical service;  the  office  is  for  the  man,  not  the  man 
for  the  office.  I  had  a  friend,  a  young  man,  who  had 
never  been  in  politics  in  his  life,  though  he  had  been 
born  and  reared  in  Ohio.  He  was  of  an  old,  wealthy 
and  aristocratic  family,  a  graduate  of  an  eastern 
university.  His  name  was  Franklin  Macomber.  I 
appointed  him  a  member  of  the  Board  of  Public 
Safety — we  still  had  the  board  plan  of  government 
then — and  the  appointment  to  office  of  a  young  aris- 
tocrat afforded  the  newspapers  and  cartoonists  an 
opportunity  for  ridicule  which  they  did  not  over- 
look. But  I  knew  the  boy.  I  had  seen  him  play  foot- 
ball, for  one  thing,  and  I  knew  how  he  managed  his 
own  business.  The  vigor  and  the  nerve  he  had  dis- 
played on  the  football  field  at  once  showed  in  his 
duties,  and  the  ability  and  devotion  he  displayed  in 
his  own  affairs  he  applied  in  the  public  service.  The 
criticism  to  which  the  administration  was  constantly 
subjected  distressed  him;  he  heard  so  much  of  it  at 
the  fashionable  club  where  he  had  his  luncheons.  One 
afternoon  he  came  into  City  Hall  with  an  expression 
more  somber  than  usual,  and  as  he  sat  down  in  my 
office  he  began: 

"They  are  saying " 

"Who   are   saying?"  I   asked. 

"The  people,"  he  replied. 
208 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

He  had  come,  of  course,  from  his  luncheon  at  the 
club.  His  motor  car  was  at  the  door  of  the  city 
hall,  and  I  asked  him  to  take  me  for  a  drive,  and 
I  suggested  certain  parts  of  town  through  which, 
for  a  change,  we  might  go.  We  ignored  the  avenues 
and  the  boulevards,  and  for  two  hours  drove  about 
through  quiet  streets  far  from  the  life  of  the  town 
as  we  knew  it  and  as  all  men  down  in  the  business 
section  knew  it — the  old  third  ward,  where  the  Poles 
lived,  and  around  to  the  upper  end  of  the  old  seventh 
where  the  shops  and  factories  were,  and  then  on  over 
through  the  eighth  and  the  ninth,  and  so  up  to  the 
Hill,  and  after  we  had  passed  by  all  those  blocks  and 
blocks  of  humble  little  homes,  cottages  of  one  story, 
and  all  that,  I  asked  him  if  he  knew  what  the  folk  who 
lived  in  them  were  saying  about  the  administration. 

"Why,  no,"  he  answered.  "I  never  talk  with  any 
of  them." 

"Well,"  I  ventured  to  say,  "they  are  the  people, 
they  who  live  in  those  little  houses  with  the  low 
roofs.     It  is  important  to  know  how  they  feel,  too." 

I  always  felt  that  he  had  a  new  vision  after  that ; 
he  saw  that  if  government  was  to  mean  anything 
to  these  persons,  it  must  be  made  human,  and  the 
reforms  in  the  police  and  fire  departments  he 
wrought  out  in  that  spirit  were  such  that  when  he 
died,  in  not  quite  four  years,  when  he  was  just 
turned  thirty,  the  cartoonist  had  long  since  ceased 
to  caricature  him  as  an  idle  fop,  and  the  newspaper 
editorials  mourned  him,  in  common  with  most  of  the 
community,  as  one  of  the  best  public  servants  our 
city,  or  any  city,  ever  had. 

209 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 


XXXVII 

I  went  into  the  mayor's  office,  as  I  said,  all  un- 
prepared. My  equipment  was  what  the  observations 
of  a  political  reporter,  a  young  lawyer's  participa- 
tion in  the  politics  of  his  state,  and  an  intimacy  with 
Golden  Rule  Jones  could  make  it.  It  was  not  much, 
though  it  was  as  much  perhaps  as  have  most  men 
who  become  municipal  officials  in  our  land,  where 
in  all  branches  of  the  civil  service,  training  and  ex- 
perience, when  they  are  considered  at  all,  seem  to  be 
the  last  requisites.  The  condition  I  suppose  is  im- 
plicit in  democracy,  which  has  the  defects  of  its 
own  virtues,  and  founds  its  institutions  in  distrust. 
They  order  these  things  better  in  Germany,  by  com- 
mitting the  administration  of  municipal  affairs  to 
trained  men  as  to  a  learned  profession,  though  the 
German  cities  have  the  disadvantage  of  having  so  re- 
formed their  civil  service  that  it  is  a  monstrous  bu- 
reaucracy. I  had  been  chosen  chiefly  because  I  had 
been  the  friend  of  my  distinguished  predecessor,  and 
for  a  long  time  I  was  so  inveterately  referred  to  as  of 
that  honored  relation,  so  invariably  introduced  as 
the  successor  of  Golden  Rule  Jones,  that  I  was 
haunted  by  the  disquieting  dread  that  I  was  ex- 
pected to  be,  if  not  a  replica  of  him,  at  least  some 
sort  of  measurable  imitation  of  his  manners  and 
methods,  the  most  impossible  achievement  in  the 
world,  since  his  was  a  personality  wholly  original 
and  unique.  And  then  besides,  a  man  prefers  to 
be  himself.     But  of  all  those,  and  they  were  many 

210 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

and  respectable,  who  doubted  my  ability,  there  was 
none  whose  distrust  could  exceed  my  own.  I  knew 
one  thing,  at  any  rate,  and  that  was,  that  I  did  not 
know. 

Aside  from  my  political  principles,  which  I  pre- 
sume may  as  well  be  called  liberal,  and  certain  the- 
ories which  were  called  radical,  though  even  then  I 
knew  enough  of  human  nature  to  know  that  they 
could  not  be  realized,  especially  in  one  small  city 
in  the  American  Middle  West,  I  had  been  able  to 
make,  or  at  least  to  recognize  when  others  made 
them,  as  Mr.  Bryce  and  most  of  the  students  of  mu- 
nicipal government  in  America  had  done,  two  or 
three  generalizations  which,  upon  the  whole,  after 
four  terms  in  a  mayor's  office  testing  them,  I  still  be- 
lieve to  be  sound.  The  first  was  that,  whatever  the 
mere  form  of  local  government,  our  cities  were  di- 
rectly ruled  by  those  small  coteries  we  had  come  to 
call  political  machines;  the  second,  that  these  ma- 
chines ruled  the  cities  for  the  benefit  of  public  utility 
corporations;  and  the  third,  that  the  legal  power 
through  which  this  was  accomplished  was  derived 
from  legislatures  controlled  by  the  same  persons  in 
the  same  interest.  That  is,  the  people  had  no  voice 
in  their  own  affairs ;  representative  government  it- 
self had  disappeared.  Therefore  these  remedies 
seemed  to  be  indicated,  as  the  doctors  say — non- 
partizan  city  elections,  municipal  ownership,  and 
home  rule  for  cities.  This  was  the  task,  this  was 
the  program. 

We  had  already  defeated  the  machines ;  Jones  had 
made  that  victory  possible  by  his  great  pioneer  work 

211 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

in  destroying  the  superstition  of  party  regularity. 
I  say  defeated  the  machines,  when  perhaps  I  should 
say  checked  the  machines,  since  the  bosses  remained 
and  the  partizans  who  made  them  possible.  And  the 
public  utilities  were  in  private  hands,  the  street  rail- 
way company  still  was  there,  desperate  because  its 
franchises  were  about  to  expire,  and  its  securities, 
through  the  financiering  too  familiar  to  America  in 
these  latter  days,  six  times  the  amount  of  its  actual 
investment.  And  down  at  Columbus,  the  legisla- 
ture still  was  sitting,  controlled  by  rural  members 
who  knew  nothing  of  cities  or  of  city  life  or  city 
problems,  farmers  and  country  lawyers  and  the  poli- 
ticians of  small  towns,  who,  in  the  historic  oppo- 
sition of  the  ruralite  to  the  urbanite,  could  not 
only  favor  their  party  confreres  and  conspirators 
from  the  city — machine  politicians  to  whom  they 
turned  for  advice — but  gain  a  cheap  reclame  at  home 
by  opposing  every  measure  designed  to  set  the  cities 
free.  Thus  the  bosses  in  both  parties,  the  machine 
politicians,  the  corporations,  and  their  lawyers,  pro- 
moters, lobbyists,  kept  editors,  ward  heelers,  office 
holders,  spies,  and  parasites  of  every  kind  were  lying 
in  wait  on  every  hand.  And  besides,  though  in- 
spired by  other  motives,  the  "good"  people  were  al- 
ways insisting  on  the  "moral"  issue;  urging  us  to 
turn  aside  from  our  larger  immediate  purpose,  and 
concentrate  our  official  attention  on  the  "bad"  peo- 
ple— and  wreck  our  movement.  Our  immediate  pur- 
pose was  to  defeat  the  effort  of  the  street  railway 
company  to  obtain  a  franchise,  to  prevent  it  from 
performing  the  miracle   of  transmuting  twenty-five 

212 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

millions  in  green  paper  into  twenty-five  millions  in 
gold,  and  thereby  absorb  the  commercial  values  of 
half  a  century.  To  do  this  it  was  necessary  to  win 
elections  for  years,  and  to  win  elections,  one  must 
have  votes,  and  "bad"  people  have  votes,  equally 
with  "good"  people,  and  if  one  is  to  judge  from 
the  comment  of  the  "good"  people  on  the  election  re- 
turns, the  "bad"  people  in  most  cities  are  in  the  ma- 
jority. On  that  point,  I  believe,  the  reformers  and 
the  politicians  at  least  are  agreed.  More  than  this, 
we  had  to  obtain  from  reluctant  legislatures  the  pow- 
ers that  would  put  the  city  at  least  on  equal  terms 
with  the  corporations  which  had  always  proved  so 
much  more  potent  than  the  city.  Such  was  the 
struggle  our  movement  faced,  such  was  the  victory  to 
be  won  before  our  city  could  be  free  from  the  tri- 
umvirate that  so  long  had  exploited  it,  the  political 
boss,  the  franchise  promoter,  and  the  country  poli- 
tician. The  Free  City!  That  was  the  noble  dream. 
Well  might  the  wise  and  sophisticated  laugh  at 
their  mayor  and  call  him  dreamer!  It  was,  and, 
alas,  it  is  a  dream.  But  youth  is  so  sublimely  con- 
fident, and  counts  so  little  on  opposition.  Not  the 
opposition  of  those  who  array  themselves  against 
it — that  was  to  be  expected,  of  course,  that  was 
part  of  the  glorious  conflict — but  the  opposition 
from  within  the  ranks,  the  opposition  on  the  hither 
side  of  the  barricade.  For  youth  thinks,  sometimes, 
that  even  opponents  may  be  won,  if  only  they  can 
be  brought  to  that  vantage  ground  whence  one  in- 
evitably beholds  the  fair  and  radiant  vision.  It  had 
not  expected  the  falling  away  of  followers,  of  sup- 

213 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

porters,  even  of  friends — the  strangely  averted  eye 
on  the  street,  the  suddenly  abandoned  weekly  call, 
the  cessation  of  little  notes  of  encouragement,  the 
amazing  revelations  of  malignity  and  bitterness  at 
election  times,  and  the  flood  increasing  in  volume  at 
each  succeeding  election.  One  man,  thought  to  be 
devoted  to  a  cause,  fails  in  his  desire  to  secure  an 
office;  another  you  refuse  a  contract;  he  whom  you 
neglected  to  favor  in  January  punctually  appears  in 
the  opposition  ranks  in  November,  one  by  one  they 
drop  away,  and  multiply  into  an  army.  Even  in  the 
official  group  in  the  City  Hall  and  in  the  council, 
there  are  jealousies,  and  childish  spites,  and  pitiable 
little  ambitions  and  with  them  misunderstanding, 
gossip,  slander,  anonymous  attacks,  lies,  abuse, 
hatred,  until  youth  makes  the  awful  discovery  that 
there  is,  after  all,  in  human  nature,  pure  malice, 
and  youth  must  fight  hard  to  retain  its  ideals,  so 
continually  are  all  the  old  lovely  illusions  stripped 
away  in  this  bewildering  complication  of  little  trage- 
dies and  comedies  we  call  life. 

To  be  sure,  youth  might  have  known,  having  read 
the  like  in  books  from  infancy,  and  having  made 
some  reflections  of  its  own  on  the  irony  of  things, 
and  indulged  from  time  to  time  in  philosophizings. 
But  that  was  about  the  experience  of  others,  from 
which  none  of  us  is  wise  enough  to  learn.  Most  of 
us  indeed  are  not  wise  enough  to  learn  from  our 
own.  It  is  all  a  part  of  life.  What  a  thing  human 
life  is,  to  be  sure,  and  human  nature!  Ay  di  mi! 
as  Carlyle  used  to  say.  Patience,  and  shuffle  the 
cards !  .  .  . 

214 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

...  I  had  no  intention  of  recalling  such  things. 
Did  not  Jones  say  that  when  the  Golden  Rule  would 
not  work,  it  was  not  the  fault  of  the  Rule,  but  be- 
cause one  did  not  quite  know  how  to  work  it?  I  have 
no  intention  of  setting  down  the  failures  or  the  little 
successes  of  four  terms  as  mayor.  Nor  shalLI  write 
a  little  history  of  those  terms  in  office ;  I  could  not, 
and  it  would  not  be  worth  while  if  I  cjuM.  I  shall 
not  attempt  in  these  pages  a  treatise  on  municipal 
government,  for  if  the  task  were  rightly  executed, 
it  would  be  a  history  of  civilization.  Non-partizan- 
ship  in  municipal  elections,  municipal  ownership, 
home  rule  for  cities, — who  is  interested  in  these?  I 
have  discussed  them  in  interviews — ("Is  there  to  be  a 
statement  for  us  this  morning,  Mr.  Mayor?") — and 
speeches  numerous  as  autumn  leaves,  and  like  them, 
lost  now  in  the  winds  to  which  they  were  given. 

After  all,  it  is  life  in  which  we  are  all  interested. 
And  one  sees  a  deal  of  life  in  a  mayor's  office,  and  in 
it  one  may  learn  to  envisage  it  as — just  life.  Then 
one  can  have  a  philosophy  about  it,  though  one  can 
not  discover  a  panacea,  some  sort  of  sociological 
patent  medicine  to  be  administered  to  the  commu- 
nity, like  Socialism,  or  Prohibition,  or  absolute  law 
enforcement,  or  the  commission  form  of  government. 
One  indeed  may  open  one's  eyes  and  look  at  one's 
city  and  presently  behold  its  vast  antitheses,  its 
boulevards  and  marble  palaces  at  one  end,  and  its 
slums,  its  tenements  and  tenderloins  at  the  other. 
He  may  discern  there  the  operations  of  universal 
and  inexorable  laws,  and  realize  the  tremendous  con- 
vict that  everywhere  and  in  all  times  goes  on  be- 

215 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

tween  privilege  and  the  people.  Such  a  view  may 
simplify  life  for  him;  it  may  make  easy  the  perora- 
tion to  the  campaign  speech;  it  may  provide  a  glib 
and  facile  answer  to  any  question.  But  he  should 
have  a  care  lest  it  make  him  the  slave  of  its  own 
cliches,  as  Socialists  for  instance,  when  they  become 
purely  scientific,  explain  every  human  impulse,  emo- 
tion and  deed  by  simply  repeating  the  formula 
"Economic  determinism." 

But  it  will  not  do;  it  will  not  suffice.  This  view 
of  life  is  simple  only  because  it  is  narrow  and  con- 
fined; in  far  perspectives  there  appear  curious  and 
perplexing  contradictions.  And  even  then,  the  most 
exhaustive  analysis  of  life  and  of  human  society, 
however  immense  and  comprehensive,  however  logi- 
cal and  inevitable  its  generalizations,  must  always 
fall  short  simply  because  no  human  mind  and  no 
assembly  of  human  minds  can  ever  wholly  envisage 
the  vast  and  bewildering  complexity  of  human  life. 
Each  man  views  life  from  that  angle  where  he  hap- 
pens to  have  been  placed  by  forces  he  cannot  com- 
prehend. All  of  which  no  doubt  is  a  mere  repetition 
in  feebler  terms  of  what  has  heretofore  been  spoken 
of  the  inherent  vice  of  the  sectarian  mind.  There 
are  no  rigid  distinctions  of  good  and  bad,  of  prole- 
tarians and  capitalists,  of  privileged  and  pro- 
scribed; there  are  just  people,  just  folks,  as  Jones 
said,  with  their  human  weaknesses,  follies,  and  mis- 
takes, their  petty  ambitions,  their  miserable  jealous- 
ies and  envies,  their  triumphs,  and  glories  and 
boundless  dreams,  and  all  tending  some  whither,  they 
know  not  where  nor  how,  and  all  pretty  much  alike. 

216 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

And  government,  be  its  form  what  it  may,  is  but 
the  reflection  of  all  these  qualities.  The  city,  said 
Coriolanus,  is  the  people,  and  as  Jones  used  to  say, 
with  those  strange  embracing  gestures,  "I  believe  in 
all  the  people." 

XXXVIII 

However,  all  these  confused  elements  make  the 
task  of  a  mayor  exceedingly  difficult,  especially  in 
America  where  there  are,  not  so  many  kinds  of 
people,  but  so  many  different  standards  and  customs 
and  habits.  When  one  gets  down  into  humanity, 
one  beholds  not  two  classes,  separate  and  distinct 
as  the  sexes,  but  innumerable  classes.  In  Toledo 
something  more  than  twenty  languages  and  dialects 
are  spoken  every  day,  and  as  the  mayor  is  addressed 
the  chorus  becomes  a  very  babel,  a  confusion  of 
tongues,  all  counseling  him  to  his  duty.  The  re- 
sult is  apt  to  be  perplexing  at  times.  The  rights 
of  "business"  in  the  streets  and  to  the  public  prop- 
erty, the  proper  bounds  within  which  strikers  and 
strike  breakers  are  to  be  confined,  the  limitations 
of  the  activities  of  pickets,  the  hours  in  which  it  is 
proper  to  drink  beer,  who  in  the  community  should 
gamble,  whether  Irishmen  or  Germans  make  the 
better  policemen;  the  exact  proportion  of  public 
jobs  which  Poles  and  Hungarians  should  hold; 
whether  Socialists  on  their  soap  boxes  are  obstruct- 
ing traffic  or  merely  exercising  the  constitutional 
right  of  free  speech,  whether  there  are  more  Cath- 
olics than  Protestants  holding  office;  whether  the 

217 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

East  Side  is  receiving  its  due  consideration  in  com- 
parison with  the  West  Side;  whether  boys  have  the 
right  to  play  ball  in  the  streets,  and  lovers  to  spoon 
in  parks,  and  whose  conceptions  of  morals  is  to  pre- 
vail— these,  like  the  sins  of  the  Psalmist,  are  ever 
before  him. 

And  with  it  all  there  is  a  strange,  inexplicable 
belief  in  the  almost  supernatural  power  of  a  mayor. 
I  have  been  waited  on  by  committees — of  aged  men 
— demanding  that  I  stop  at  once  those  lovers  who 
sought  the  public  park  on  moonlit  nights  in  June, 
I  have  been  roused  from  bed  at  two  o'clock  in  the 
morning,  with  a  demand  that  a  team  of  horses  in 
a  barn  four  miles  on  the  other  side  of  town  be  fed ; 
innumerable  ladies  have  appealed  to  me  to  compel 
their  husbands  to  show  them  more  affectionate  at- 
tention, others  have  asked  me  to  prohibit  their 
neighbors  from  talking  about  them.  One  Jewish 
resident  was  so  devout  that  he  emigrated  to  Jerusa- 
lem, and  his  family  insisted  that  I  recall  him;  a 
Christian  missionary  asked  me  to  detail  policemen  to 
assist  him  in  converting  the  Jews  to  his  creed;  and 
pathetic  mothers  were  ever  imploring  me  to  order 
the  release  of  their  sons  and  husbands  from  prisons 
and  penitentiaries,  over  which  I  had  no  possible 
jurisdiction.  I  have  recalled  I  know  not  how  many 
times  a  remark  Jones  made  one  evening  after  one 
of  those  weary  days  I  afterward  came  to  know  so 
well;  "I  could  wash  my  hands  every  day  in  women's 
tears." 

Of  course,  the  main  thing  was  not  to  wash  one's 
hands  of  them  or  their  difficulties.     I  remember  one 

218 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

poor  soul  whose  husband  was  in  the  penitentiary. 
She  came  to  me  in  a  despair  that  was  almost  fran- 
tic, and  showed  me  a  letter  she  had  received  from 
her  husband.  A  new  governor  had  been  elected  in 
that  state  wherein  he  was  imprisoned,  and  he  urged 
his  wife,  in  the  letter  she  gave  me  to  read,  to  secure 
a  pardon  for  him  before  the  new  governor  was  in- 
augurated. "They  say,"  he  wrote,  "that  the  new 
governor  is  a  good  church  member,  which  is  a  bad 
sign  for  being  good  to  prisoners." 

Poor  soul!  It  was  impossible  to  explain  to  her 
that  I  was  wholly  powerless.  She  stood  and  humbly 
shook  her  sorrowful  head,  and  to  each  new  attempt 
at  explanation  she  said: 

"You  are  the  father  of  all." 

It  was  a  phrase  which  most  of  the  women  of  the 
foreign  born  population  employed;  they  repeated 
it  as  though  it  were  some  charmed  formula.  This 
exaggerated  notion  of  the  mayoral  power  was  not 
confined  to  those  citizens  of  the  foreign  quarters ; 
it  was  shared  by  many  of  the  native  Americans,  who 
held  the  mayor  responsible  for  all  the  vices  of  the 
community,  and  I  was  never  more  sharply  criticized 
than  when,  in  refusing  to  sanction  the  enactment  of 
a  curfew  ordinance,  I  tentatively  advanced  the  sug- 
gestion that,  if  it  did  not  seem  too  outrageously 
radical,  the  rearing  and  training  of  children  was 
the  duty,  not  so  much  of  the  police  as  of  parents, 
pastors  and  teachers. 

It  may  have  been  because,  in  some  way,  it  had  got 
abroad  that  I  was  a  reformer  myself.  It  was  at  a 
time  when  there  was  new  and  searching  inquiry,  and 

219 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

a  new  sense  of  public  decency,  the  result  of  a  pro- 
found impulse  in  the  public  consciousness,  and  I 
had  been  of  those  who  in  my  town  had  opposed  the 
political  machines.  Constructive  thinking  and  con- 
structive work  being  the  hardest  task  in  the  world, 
one  of  which  our  democracy  in  its  present  develop- 
ment is  not  yet  fully  capable,  the  impulse  spent  itself 
largely  in  destructive  work.  That  was  natural;  it 
is  a  quality  inherent  in  humanity.  My  friend  Ker- 
mode  F.  Gill,  the  artist-builder  and  contractor  of 
Cleveland,  once  told  me  that  while  it  is  difficult  to 
get  men  to  carry  on  any  large  construction,  and 
carry  it  on  well,  and  necessary  to  set  task  masters 
over  them  to  have  the  work  done  at  all,  there  is 
a  wholly  different  spirit  in  evidence  when  the  work 
is  one  of  demolition.  If  a  great  building  is  to 
be  torn  down,  the  men  need  no  task  masters,  no 
speeding  up,  they  fly  at  it  in  a  perfect  frenzy,  with 
a  veritable  passion,  and  tear  it  down  so  swiftly  that 
the  one  difficulty  is  to  get  the  salvage.  And  in 
the  course  of  building  public  works  I  have  observed 
the  same  phenomenon.  While  the  forces  are  tear- 
ing down,  while  they  are  excavating,  that  black 
fringe  of  spectators,  the  "crow  line"  the  builders 
call  it,  is  always  there.  But  when  once  the  work 
is  above  ground,  and  construction  begins,  when  the 
structure  lifts  itself,  when  it  aspires, — the  crow 
line  dissolves  and  melts  quite  away.  This,  in  a  sense, 
is  true  of  man  in  any  of  his  operations.  When  the 
great  awakening  came,  after  the  first  shock  of  sur- 
prise, after  the  first  resolve  to  do  better,  the  public 
went  at  the  work  of  demolition,  all  about  the  arena 

220 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

the  thumbs  of  the  multitude  were  turned  down,  and 
we  witnessed  the  tragedy  of  men  who  but  a  short 
while  before  had  been  praised  and  lauded  for  their 
possessions,  and  used  as  models  for  little  boys  in 
Sunday-school,  suddenly  stripped  of  all  their  cov- 
eted garments,  and  held  up  to  the  hatred  and  ridi- 
cule of  a  world  that  can  yet  think  of  nothing  better 
than  the  stocks,  the  pillory,  the  jail,  and  the  scaffold. 

In  Edinburgh  I  was  shown  a  little  church  of 
which  Sir  Walter  Scott  was  once  a  vestryman,  or 
deacon  or  elder  or  some  such  official,  and  in  the  door 
still  hung  the  irons  in  which  offenders  were  fastened 
on  Sunday  mornings  so  that  the  righteous,  as  they 
went  to  pray,  might  comfort  themselves  with  a  con- 
soling sense  of  their  own  goodness  by  spitting  in 
the  face  of  the  sinner.  Many  of  our  reforms  are 
still  carried  on  in  this  spirit,  and  are  no  more  sen- 
sible or  productive  of  good. 

The  word  "reformer,"  like  the  word  "politician" 
has  degenerated,  and,  in  the  mind  of  the  common 
man,  come  to  connote  something  very  disagreeable. 
In  four  terms  as  mayor  I  came  to  know  both  species 
pretty  well,  and,  in  the  later  connotations  of  the 
term,  I  prefer  the  politician.  He,  at  least,  is  hu- 
man. The  reformers,  as  Emerson  said,  affect  one 
as  the  insane  do;  their  motives  may  be  pious,  but 
their  methods  are  profane.  They  are  a  buzz  in  the 
ear. 

I  had  read  this  in  Emerson  in  my  youth,  when  for 
a  long  time  I  had  a  veritable  passion  for  him,  just 
as  in  a  former  stage,  and  another  mood,  I  had  had 
a  veritable  passion  for  books  about  Napoleon,  and, 

221 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

at  another,  for  the  works  of  Carlyle,  and  the  contro- 
versy excited  by  the  reckless  Froude;  but  the  truth 
— as  it  appears  to  me,  or  at  any  rate,  the  part  of 
a  truth — was  not  borne  in  upon  me  until  I  came 
to  know  and  to  regard,  with  dread,  the  possibility 
that  I  might  be  included  in  their  number,  which  I 
should  not  like,  unless  it  were  as  a  mere  brother  in 
humanity,  somewhat  estranged  in  spirit  though  we 
should  be. 


XXXIX 

The  disadvantages  of  being  classed  as  a  reformer 
are  not,  I  am  sure,  sufficiently  appreciated;  if  they 
were  the  peace  of  the  world  would  not  be  troubled 
as  constantly  as  it  is  by  those  who  would  make  man- 
kind over  on  a  model  of  which  they  present  them- 
selves as  the  unattractive  example.  One  of  those 
advantages  is  that  each  reformer  thinks  that  all  the 
other  reformers  are  in  honor  committed  to  his  re- 
form; he  writes  them  letters  asking  for  expressions 
of  sympathy  and  support,  and,  generally,  when  he 
finds  that  each  of  the  others  has  some  darling  re- 
form of  his  own  which  he  is  determined  to  try  on  an 
unwilling  public,  he  is  at  once  denounced  as  a  traitor 
to  the  whole  scheme  of  reform  in  the  universe.  An- 
other disadvantage  is  that  reformers  never  are  re- 
elected, and  I  might  set  forth  others,  were  it  my 
intention  to  embark  on  that  interesting  subject. 

I  am  moved  to  these  observations,  however,  by  the 
recollection  of  an  experience,  exasperating  at  the 

222 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

time,  though  now  of  no  moment,  since  it  has  cured 
itself  as  will  most  exasperations  if  left  long  enough 
to  themselves.  Its  importance,  if  it  have  any  im- 
portance at  all,  may  be  ascribed  to  its  effect  of  hav- 
ing saved  me  from  any  such  fatal  classification, 
unless  I  were  far  enough  away  from  home,  where 
almost  anyone  may  be  regarded  as  a  reformer.  To 
be  sure,  as  I  was  just  saying,  in  the  days  immedi- 
ately following  my  first  election,  I  was  regarded  by 
many  of  the  sacred  and  illuminated  host  of  reform- 
ers in  the  land  as  one  of  them,  since  I  was  asked  to 
join  in  all  sorts  of  movements  for  all  sorts  of  pro- 
hibitions,— of  the  use  of  intoxicating  liquors  and 
tobacco  and  cigarettes,  and  I  know  not  what  other 
vices  abhorred  by  those  who  are  not  addicted  to 
them, — but  it  was  my  good  luck,  as  it  seems  now  to 
have  been,  to  be  saved  from  that  fate  by  as  good 
and  faithful  an  enemy  as  ever  helped  a  politician 
along.  The  Democrats  had  been  placed  in  power 
that  year  in  Ohio,  and  with  Tom  Johnson,  many  of 
us  felt  that  it  was  an  opportunity  to  secure  cer- 
tain changes  in  the  laws  of  Ohio  relating  to  the 
government  of  cities,  that  is,  we  felt  it  was  time 
to  secure  our  own  reforms;  everyone  else,  of  course, 
felt  the  same  way  about  his  reforms.  We  had  or- 
ganized late  in  the  previous  year  an  association  of 
the  mayors  of  the  cities  in  the  state  for  the  pur- 
pose of  making  changes  in  the  municipal  code  that 
would  give  the  cities  a  more  mobile  form  of  govern- 
ment and  greater  powers,  in  other  words,  it  was 
the  first  definite  movement  in  favor  of  home  rule  for 
cities,  a  liberation  for  which  we  struggled  for  al- 

223 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

most  a  decade  before  we  achieved  any  measure  of 
success.  We  had  drafted  a  new  municipal  code 
and  had  met  at  Columbus  early  in  that  January  in 
which  I  took  my  office,  to  put  the  finishing  touches 
to  our  code  before  presenting  it  to  the  legislature, 
and  one  morning  I  strolled  into  the  hall  of  the  House 
of  Representatives  before  the  daily  session  had  been 
convened. 

There  was  in  the  House  at  that  time  a  newly 
elected  member  whom  Johnson  had  supported  for 
election  and  no  sooner  was  he  in  his  seat  than  he 
opposed  every  measure  Johnson  espoused,  and, 
under  the  warming  applause  his  disloyalty  won  from 
Johnson's  enemies,  he  became  an  opponent  of  the 
mayor  more  vociferous  than  effective.  He  was  ex- 
actly, I  think,  of  that  type  described  by  Emerson, 
who  in  the  course  of  saying  everything  worth  say- 
ing, or  that  will  be  worth  saying  for  the  next  two 
hundred  years,  said:  "Republics  abound  in  young 
civilians  who  believe  that  the  laws  make  the  city, 
that  grave  modifications  of  the  policy  and  modes  of 
living  and  employments  of  the  population,  that  com- 
merce, education  and  religion,  may  be  voted  in  or 
out;  and  that  any  measure,  though  it  were  absurd, 
may  be  imposed  on  a  people  if  only  you  can  get  suf- 
ficient voices  to  make  it  a  law.  But  the  wise  know 
that  foolish  legislation  is  a  rope  of  sand  which  per- 
ishes in  the  twisting;  that  the  state  must  follow  and 
not  lead  the  character  and  progress  of  the  citizen; 
the  strongest  usurper  is  quickly  got  rid  of ;  and  they 
only  who  build  on  Ideas  build  for  eternity ;  and  that 
the  form  of  government  which  prevails  is  the  expres- 

224 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

sion  of  what  cultivation  exists  in  the  population 
which  permits  it.  The  law  is  only  a  memorandum. 
We  are  superstitious,  and  esteem  the  statute  some- 
what ;  so  much  life  as  it  has  in  the  character  of  liv- 
ing men  is  its  force." 

I  knew  this  young  civilian  then  only  as  one  of  the 
Johnson  group  and  as  that  was  sufficient  introduc- 
tion, in  the  camaraderie  that  existed  between  those  of 
us  who  were  devoted  to  the  same  cause,  I  stopped,  at 
his  salutation,  and  chatted  with  him  for  a  moment. 
He  had  asked  my  opinion  on  a  bill  he  had  intro- 
duced, a  measure  to  prohibit  or  regulate  public 
dances  in  cities,  or  some  such  thing,  and  when  I 
failed  to  evince  the  due  degree  of  interest  in  the 
young  man's  measure,  he  was  at  once  displeased  and 
tried  to  heat  me  to  the  proper  degree  of  warmth  in 
the  holy  cause  of  reform.  He  began,  of  course,  by 
an  indignant  demand  to  know  if  I  was  in  favor  of 
the  evils  that  were  connected  with  public  dances,  and 
when  I  tried  to  show  him  that  my  inability  to  recog- 
nize his  measure  as  the  only  adequate  method  of 
dealing  with  those  evils  did  not  necessarily  indicate 
approval  of  them,  he  struck  the  prescribed  atti- 
tude, held  up  his  right  hand  and  said  something  in 
the  melodramatic  style,  about  the  oath  of  office  I 
had  taken  not  many  days  before.  I  saw  at  once 
then  that  I  was  dealing  with  a  member  in  high 
standing  of  the  order  of  the  indurated  sectarian 
mind,  whose  fanaticism  makes  them  the  most  impos- 
sible persons  in  the  world,  and  having  never  been 
certain  which  of  the  advice  in  the  Proverbs  should 
be  accepted,  I  yielded  to  a  fatal  habit  of  joking — 

225 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

the  history  of  the  Republic  is  strewn  with  the  wrecks 
of  careers  that  were  broken  by  a  jest — and  told  him 
that  I  had  taken  my  oath  of  office  before  a  notary 
public,  and  that  perhaps  it  had  not  been  of  full  ef- 
ficacy on  that  account. 

And  then  I  went  away,  and  forgot  the  incident. 
It  was  revived  in  my  memory,  however,  and  intensi- 
fied in  its  interest  for  me  the  next  morning,  when 
on  getting  back  home,  I  saw  in  the  newspapers  a 
despatch  from  Columbus,  under  the  most  ominous 
of  black  headlines,  stating  that  I  had  told  the  dis- 
tinguished representative,  on  the  very  floor  of  the 
House,  under  the  aegis,  one  almost  might  say,  of 
the  state,  that  I  had  no  reverence  for  my  oath  of  of- 
fice, and  did  not  intend  to  respect  it.  Here  was 
anarchy  for  you,  indeed,  from  the  old  pupil  of  Alt- 
geld! 

It  was,  of  course,  useless  to  explain,  since  any 
statement  I  might  make  would  be  but  one  more  wel- 
come knot  to  the  tangle  of  misrepresentation  in 
which  the  unhappy  incident  was  being  so  gladly 
snarled,  and  I  tried  to  forget  it,  though  that  was 
impossible,  since  it  provided  the  text  for  many  a 
sanctimonious  editorial  in  the  land,  in  each  one  of 
which  some  addition  was  made  to  the  original  re- 
port. Herbert  Spencer  says  somewhere  that  for 
every  story  told  in  the  world  there  is  some  basis  of 
truth,  and  I  suppose  he  is  right,  but  I  have  always 
felt  that  he  did  not,  at  least  in  my  reading  of  him, 
sufficiently  characterize  that  worst  vice  of  the  human 
mind,  intellectual  dishonesty.  Perhaps  if  he  had  as- 
sociated less  with  scientists  and  more  with  profes- 

226 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

sional  reformers  of  the  morals  of  other  persons  he 
would  not  have  omitted  this  curious  specimen  from 
his  philosophic  analysis,  if  he  did  omit  it ;  and  if  that 
experience  of  the  young  civilian  at  Columbus  had 
not  been  sufficient,  I  could  have  supplied  him  with 
another  out  of  an  episode  in  which  I  had  borne  a 
part  some  years  before,  one  which  should  have  been 
sufficient  to  warn  me  against  the  type  for  the  rest 
of  my  life. 

It  concerns  another  young  civilian,  though  this 
one  was  so  old  that  he  should  have  known  better, 
and  relates  to  a  time  years  before  when  I  happened 
to  be  running  for  the  state  senate.  I  say  happened, 
for  it  was  precisely  of  that  fortuitous  nature,  since 
I  had  not  been  concerned  in  the  circumstances  which 
nominated  me,  so  entirely  negative  in  their  character 
that  I  might  as  well  have  been  said  not  to  be  run- 
ning at  all.  I  was  a  young  lawyer,  just  beginning 
to  practice,  and  in  my  wide  leisure  was  out  of  town 
that  summer,  economically  spending  a  holiday  at 
my  father's  house,  and,  since  the  Democrats  had  no 
hope  in  this  world  of  carrying  the  district,  and 
could  get  no  one  who  was  on  the  ground  to  defend 
himself  to  accept  their  nomination,  they  had  nomi- 
nated me.  It  was  an  honor,  perhaps,  but  so  empty 
and  futile  that  when  I  came  home  again  it  seemed 
useless  even  to  decline  it,  and  best  to  forget  it,  and 
so  I  tried  to  do  that,  and  made  no  campaign  at  all. 
But  one  afternoon  I  had  a  caller,  a  tall,  dark 
visaged  man,  in  black  clerical  garb,  who  came  softly 
into  my  office,  carefully  closed  the  door,  and,  fixing 
his  strange,  intense  eyes  on  me,  said  that  he  came  to 

227 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

talk  politics.  He  represented  a  reform  league  and 
he  came,  he  said,  to  discuss  my  candidature  for  the 
state  senate,  and  to  offer  me  the  support  of  his  or- 
ganization. "Of  course,"  he  went  on  to  explain,  "we 
should  impose  certain  conditions."  He  fixed  on  me 
again  and  very  intently,  those  strange,  fanatic  eyes. 

I  knew  very  well  what  the  conditions  were ;  it  was 
hardly  necessary  for  him  to  explain  that  I  should  be 
expected  to  sign  a  pledge  to  support  the  bills  pro- 
posed by  his  organization,  some  of  which,  no  doubt, 
were  excellent  measures. 

I  explained  to  him  that  I  was  under  no  illusions 
as  to  the  campaign,  that  there  was  no  possible  chance 
of  my  election  that  year,  that  if  there  had  been  I 
never  would  have  been  nominated,  and  nothing  short 
of  a  miracle  could  elect  me.  "But,"  I  added,  "even 
if  that  miracle  happens,  though  it  will  not,  and  I 
should  be  elected,  I  should  go  down  to  Columbus  and 
to  the  Senate  able  to  say  that  I  had  made  no  prom- 
ises whatever." 

He  looked  at  me  a  moment,  with  those  strange, 
cold  eyes  peering  narrowly  out  of  his  somber  visage, 
and  as  he  gazed  they  seemed  to  contract,  and  with 
the  faint  shadow  of  a  smile  that  was  wholly  without 
humor,  he  said: 

"Well,  you  can  say  that." 

"What  do  you  mean?"  I  asked. 

The  smile  raised  the  man's  cheeks  a  little  higher 
until  they  enclosed  the  little  eyes  in  minute  wrinkles, 
and  invested  them  with  an  expression  of  the  deepest 
cunning. 

"Why,  since  you  are  opposed  to  signing  our 
228 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

pledge,  we  will  waive  that. in  your  case,  and  you  and 
I  can  have  a  little  private  understanding — no  one 

need  ever  know,  and  you  can  say "  he  was  gently 

tapping  the  ends  of  his  fingers  together,  and  the  last 
terms  of  his  proposal  seemed  to  be  absorbed  by  an 
expression  of  vulpine  significance  so  eloquent  and 
plain  in  its  meaning  that  mere  words  were  super- 
fluous. 

I  sat  there  and  looked  at  him ;  I  had  known  of  him, 
he  spoke  nearly  every  Sunday  in  some  church,  and 
took  up  collections  for  the  reform  to  which,  quite 
sincerely,  I  believe,  he  was  devoting  his  life.  Then 
I  said: 

"But  that  isn't  my  idea  even  of  politics,  to  say 
nothing  of  ethics." 

I  believe  now  that  he  had  no  conception  of  the 
moral  significance  of  his  suggestion  that  we  have 
an  implied  understanding  which  I  was  to  be  at  lib- 
erty to  deny  if  the  exigencies  of  politics  suggested 
it.  He  was  a  reformer,  belonging  to  the  order  of 
the  indurated  mind.  He  was  possessed  by  a  theory, 
which  held  his  mind  in  the  relentless  mould  of  its 
absolutism,  and  there  his  mind  had  hardened,  and, 
alas,  his  heart,  too,  no  doubt — so  that  its  original 
impressions  were  all  fixed  and  immutable,  and  not 
subject  to  change;  they  could  not  be  erased  nor 
could  any  new  impressions  be  superimposed.  He  was 
convinced  that  his  particular  theory  was  correct, 
and  that  if  only  it  could  be  imposed  on  mankind,  the 
world  would  be  infinitely  better  off;  and  that  hence 
any  means,  no  matter  what,  were  permissible  in  ef- 
fecting this  imposition,  because  of  the  good  that 

229 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

would  follow.  It  is  an  old  mental  attitude  in  this 
world,  well  treated  of  in  books,  and  understood  and 
recognized  by  everyone  except  those  who  adopt  it, 
and  in  its  spirit  every  new  reform  is  promulgated  by 
its  avatar.  But  the  reformer  never  thinks  of  him- 
self in  any  such  light,  of  course,  he  does  not  under- 
stand it  any  more  than  he  understands  mankind's 
distrust  of  him.  It  is  the  instinctive  fear  of  the 
theorist  that  has  been  felt  for  every  one  of  them  from 
Robespierre,  the  archtype,  and  impossibilist  par  ex- 
cellence, down  to  the  latest  man  haranguing  his  little 
idle  crowd  on  the  street  corner. 


XL 


These  observations  come  with  the  recollection  of 
those  days  of  my  first  term  in  the  mayor's  office 
when  I  had  so  much  to  do  with  reformers  that  I 
earnestly  desired  that  no  one  would  ever  include  me 
in  their  category.  They  came  to  see  me  so  often 
and  in  such  numbers  that  my  whole  view  of  life  was 
quite  in  danger  of  distortion.  It  seemed  that  half 
the  populace  had  set  forth  in  a  rage  to  reform  man- 
kind, and  their  first  need  was  to  get  the  mayor  to  use 
the  police  force  to  help  them.  When  they  did  not 
call  at  the  office,  they  were  writing  letters.  The 
favorite  day  for  these  expressions  of  the  reforming 
spirit  was  Monday.  I  had  been  many  months  in  the 
office  however,  before  I  was  able  to  make  this  gen- 
eralization, though  from  the  first  I  could  observe 
that  Monday  took  on  something  of  that  dismal  and 

230 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

somber  tone  which  has  given  it  its  name  of  blue 
Monday.  In  the  early  days  of  a  simpler  life  in  our 
country,  when  the  customs  of  the  pioneer  had  not 
been  superseded  by  the  complexities  of  modern  exist- 
ence, its  color  used  to  be  ascribed  to  the  fact  that  it 
was  wash  day,  and  perhaps  it  has  remained  a  sort  of 
moral  wash  day  ever  since.  At  any  rate  we  soon 
discovered  that  everyone  who  had  a  grievance  or  a 
complaint  or  a  suggestion  about  his  neighbor  or 
some  larger  scheme  of  reforming  whole  groups  of  the 
population  was  most  likely  to  be  heavily  charged 
with  it  on  Monday,  and  since  the  almost  universal 
conception  among  us  is  that  all  reforms  can  be 
wrought  by  the  mayor,  by  the  simple  process  of 
issuing  an  order  to  the  police,  these  complaints 
were  of  course  lodged  at  the  mayor's  office. 

They  were  of  a  curious  variety,  expressing,  I  sup- 
pose, not  only  all  the  moral  yearnings  of  mankind, 
but  all  the  meaner  moods  of  human  nature,  and  each 
new  Monday  morning  seemed  to  have  in  reserve,  for 
a  nature  that  was  trying  to  keep  its  faith  in  human- 
ity, some  fresh  and  theretofore  unimagined  instance 
of  the  depths  of  little  meannesses  to  which  human 
nature  is  capable  of  sinking.  Many  of  them  came 
in  person  with  their  criticism,  others  sent  anony- 
mous letters.  Then  there  were  those  who  came  to 
repeat  ugly  things  they  had  heard  about  me;  "I 
wouldn't  tell  you  this  if  I  were  not  your  friend.  I 
think  you  ought  to  know  it."  Later  in  the  afternoon 
the  evenings  newspapers,  with  the  criticisms  marked, 
were  laid  on  my  desk.  All  this  made  Monday  the 
hardest  day  of  the  week,  especially  as  the  day  closed 

231 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

with  the  hebdominal  session  of  the  council,  where  one 
might  find  now  and  then  some  pretty  discouraging 
examples  of  human  meanness.  Tuesday  was  not 
quite  so  bad,  though  it  was  trying;  human  nature 
seemed  to  run  pretty  high,  or  pretty  low,  on  that 
day,  too.  By  Wednesday,  the  atmosphere  began  to 
clear,  and  by  Thursday  and  Friday,  everyone  seemed 
to  be  attending  to  his  own  business  and  letting  the 
faults  of  his  neighbors  go  unnoted  or  at  least  unre- 
ported, and  Saturday  was  a  day  of  such  calm  that 
one's  whole  faith  in  humanity  was  miraculously  re- 
stored ;  if  the  weather  was  fine  one  might  almost  dis- 
cover human  nature  as  to  be  good  as  that  nature 
which  would  reveal  herself  on  the  golf  links. 

As  a  result  of  it  all  we  finally  made  the  deduction 
— my  secretary  Bernard  Dailey,  the  stenographers 
in  the  office  and  the  reporters  who  formed  so  pleasant 
an  element  of  the  life  there — that  it  was  all  due  to 
the  effects  of  the  Sunday  that  had  intervened.  In 
the  first  place,  people  had  leisure  on  that  day  and 
in  that  leisure  they  could  whet  up  their  consciences 
and  set  them  to  the  congenial  task  of  dissecting  the 
characters  of  other  people,  or  they  could  contem- 
plate the  evils  in  the  world  and  resolve  highly  to 
make  the  mayor  do  away  with  them,  and  then  after 
the  custom  of  our  land  they  could  gorge  on  the 
huge  Sunday  noon  dinner  of  ^oast  beef,  and  then  lie 
about  all  afternoon  like  pythons  in  a  torpor  which 
produced  an  indigestion  so  acute  and  lasting  that 
for  three  days  it  passed  very  well  for  pious  fervor 
and  zeal  for  reform.  Such  at  least  was  our  theory, 
offered  here  solely  in  the  scientific  spirit,  and  not 

232 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

by  any  means  as  final.  It  was  acquiesced  in  by  all 
of  us  at  the  time,  and  has  been  supported  by  an  un- 
varying series  of  data  on  the  Monday  mornings 
since  then. 

We  submitted  it  to  Henry  Frisch,  the  police  ser- 
geant who  had  been  detailed  for  duty  in  the  mayor's 
office  for  many  years,  a  dear  and  comfortable  soul, 
who  had  served  under  several  mayors,  and  had  de- 
veloped a  philosophy  of  life  that  was  a  very  Nir- 
vana of  comfort  and  repose.  Long  ago,  so  it 
seemed  when  he  smiled  indulgently  on  the  discom- 
fiture of  blue  Monday,  he  had  given  up  humanity  as 
a  bad  job;  to  him  the  race  was  utterly  and  irre- 
deemably hopeless,  and  without  the  need  of  saying  a 
word  he  could  shake  his  honest  head  at  the  sugges- 
tion of  a  new  reform  with  a  motion  that  was  elo- 
quent of  all  negation.  He  was  very  tolerant,  how- 
ever, and  made  no  argument  in  rebuttal,  he  simply 
refused  to  accept  humanity  on  any  general  plane; 
regarding  the  race  as  a  biological  species  merely, 
he  would  confide  to  you  that  his  years  of  experience 
at  that  post  and  as  a  policeman  who  had  paced  his 
beat  and  afterward  commanded  a  sergeant's  squad, 
had  convinced  him  that  it  was  altogether  depraved, 
dishonest  and  disgusting,  but  with  any  individual 
specimen  of  the  species  he  was  not  that  way  at  all. 
He  was  really  kindness  itself.  The  next  minute,  with 
tears  in  his  eyes,  he  would  go  to  any  extremes  to 
help  some  poor  devil  out  of  trouble.  Unless  it  were 
reformers ;  for  these  he  had  no  use,  he  said,  and  if  his 
advice  had  been  accepted  he  would  have  been  per- 
mitted to  expel  them  from  the  City  Hall  by  theiv 

233 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

own  beloved  weapons  of  violence  and  force  of  arms. 
On  Sundays  he  went  fishing. 

Perhaps  at  the  time  of  which  I  am  thinking,  if 
not  very  specifically  writing,  there  was  more  of  this 
Monday  spirit  of  reform  than  is  usual.  In  the  first 
place,  much  is  expected  of  a  new  official  and  because 
he  does  not  promptly  work  those  miracles  which  are 
confidently  expected  whether  he  was  foolish  enough 
to  promise  them  or  not,  he  is  so  generally  complained 
of  that  it  may  be  set  down  as  an  axiom  of  prac- 
tical politics  that  any  elected  official,  in  the  execu- 
tive branch  of  the  government,  could  be  recalled  at 
any  time  during  the  first  year  of  his  incumbency 
of  his  office.  Just  then,  too,  there  had  been  elected 
to  the  governorship  a  gentleman  who  had  been  very 
deeply  devoted  to  the  interests  of  the  Methodist 
Church,  the  strongest  denomination  numerically  in 
Ohio — the  first  governor  of  Ohio,  indeed,  was  a 
Methodist  preacher — and  because  of  that  fact  and 
because  of  the  use  in  his  inaugural  message  of  the 
magic  phrase  "law  and  order,"  it  was  at  once  an- 
nounced in  the  most  sensational  manner  of  the  sen- 
sational press  that,  unless  all  the  sumptuary  laws  in 
Ohio  were  drastically  enforced,  all  the  mayors  of  the 
cities  would  be  removed.  Governor  Pattison  had 
been  elected  as  a  Democrat,  and  during  his  campaign 
Tom  Johnson  and  I  had  supported  him,  and  it  was 
while  we  were  in  Columbus  at  his  inauguration  that 
this  sensation  was  exploited  in  the  newspapers.  I 
remember  how  Tom  Johnson  received  it  when  one 
of  his  coterie  brought  the  extra  editions  into  the 
hotel  and  pointed  out  to  him  the  dreadful  predictions 

234 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

of  the  headlines ;  the  white,  aristocratic  hand  waved 
the  suggestion  imperiously  aside,  and  he  said: 

"Four  days,  and  it'll  all  be  over.  That's  the  life 
of  a  newspaper  sensation." 

I  believe  that  newspaper  editors  themselves  place 
the  limit  of  the  effectiveness  of  a  sensation  at  about 
that  time,  though  some  of  them  are  so  shrewd  that 
they  drop  the  sensation  the  day  before  the  people 
begin  to  lose  interest  in  it,  instead  of  waiting  for 
the  day  on  which  they  actually  tire  of  it.  Which 
may  be  an  explanation  of  the  fact  that  the  begin- 
nings of  things  are  always  treated  so  much  more 
fully  in  the  press  than  their  endings;  one  always 
reads  of  the  opening  of  the  trial,  and  the  awful 
charge,  but  is  never  told  how  it  all  came  out  in  the 
end,  unless  the  end  was  catastrophic.  The  theory  of 
the  press  is,  I  believe,  that  good  news  is  no  news. 

I  do  not  know  that  poor  Governor  Pattison  ever 
had  any  intention  of  raising  the  issue  of  local  self 
government,  and  of  raising  it  in  such  a  direct  and 
positive  way  as  by  attempting  to  remove  all  the 
mayors  of  Ohio  towns  and  cities  in  which  it  could  be 
shown  that  some  little  enactment  of  the  legislature 
had  failed  of  absolute  enforcement ;  I  suppose  he  had 
no  such  intention,  since  the  law  gave  him  no  such 
power,  though  that  made  ho  difference  to  the  pro- 
fessional reverencers  and  enforcers  of  law.  The  poor 
man  never  saw  the  governor's  office  after  that  night 
of  his  brilliant  inauguration,  when  he  stood,  very 
dark  and  weary,  with  features  drawn,  but  resolutely 
smiling,  at  his  levee  in  the  senate  chamber,  a  tragic 
figure  in  a  way,  the  first  Democratic  governor  in  a 

235 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

long  while,  and  the  fates  treating  him  with  their  cus- 
tomary irony  and  indignity  by  setting  their  seal 
upon  him  in  the  very  hour  of  his  triumph.  He  died 
in  a  few  months,  but  there  remained  many  of  course 
who  could  prophesy  in  his  name  and  cast  out  devils 
with  each  extra  edition  of  the  newspapers,  and  the 
discussion  of  law  enforcement  has  gone  on  pretty 
steadily  from  that  time  to  this. 


XLI 

I  suppose  the  discussion  is  one  which  must  go  on 
always  in  any  land  where  the  people  of  our  race 
and  tradition  dwell.  A  more  objective,  natural  and 
naive  people  would  not  be  so  interested  in  sin,  and 
when  the  late  Mayor  Gaynor  of  New  York  spoke  of 
the  difficulty  of  administering  the  affairs  of  a  modern 
city  according  to  "the  standard  of  exquisite  morals" 
held  aloft  by  some  persons  for  others,  he  designated 
in  his  clear  and  clever  way  a  class  of  citizens  familiar 
to  every  mayor  by  the  curiously  doctrinaire  order 
of  indurated  mind  with  which  they  are  endowed. 
They  begin  with  the  naive  assumption  that  their 
standard  is  the  one  and  only  correct  standard,  and 
that  since  men  have  repeatedly  refused  to  adopt  it 
on  mere  inspection  they  must  be  forced  to  do  so  by 
the  use  of  violence,  a  process  which  they  call  main- 
taining "law  and  order."  They  believe  that  any 
wrong,  any  abuse,  may  be  stopped  instantly  by  the 
passage  of  a  law,  and  if  one  venture  to  question  the 

236 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

efficacy  of  any  plan  they  propose,  he  is  said  at  once 
to  be  opposed  to  morality  and  to  religion,  and  is  set 
down  as  a  profane  and  sacrilegious  person. 

It  is,  of  course,  inconvenient  to  argue  with  a 
person  who  has  the  supreme  refuge  of  the  irrelevant 
conclusion ;  as  inconvenient  as  it  would  be  were  one 
to  be  offered  carbolic  acid  as  a  toilet  article, 
and,  upon  refusal,  be  accused  of  not  believing  in 
cleanliness.  This  order  of  mind  imagines  that  every 
phase  of  human  conduct  can  be  ordered  and  regu- 
lated by  the  enactment  of  statutes ;  that  the  indus- 
tries, occupations,  clothing,  amusements,  appetites, 
passions,  prejudices,  opinions,  ambitions,  aspirations 
and  devotions  of  man  can  be  changed,  moulded  and 
regulated  by  city  councils  and  state  legislatures. 
Every  inconvenience,  every  difficulty,  every  disagree- 
able feature  of  modern  life,  is  to  be  done  away  by 
the  passage  of  a  law. 

That  our  race  is  saturated  with  this  curious  and 
amazing  superstition  of  the  power  of  written  enact- 
ments is  shown  by  the  common  terminology.  The 
mental  reactions  of  a  large  portion  of  mankind 
against  the  irritation  of  opposing  opinion  and  con- 
duct habitually  express  themselves  in  the  phrase, 
"There  ought  to  be  a  law."  It  is  heard  as  often 
every  day  as  the  stereotyped  references  to  the 
weather.  Not  a  disagreeable  incident  in  life  is  com- 
plained of  without  that  expression;  no  one  has  a 
pet  aversion  or  a  darling  prejudice  that  he  does  not 
cherish  the  desire  of  having  a  law  passed  to  bring 
the  rest  of  the  world  around  to  his  way  of  feeling. 
And  when  a  trust  is  formed,  or  a  strike  interrupts 

237 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

business,  or  the  sheets  on  the  hotel  bed  are  too  short, 
or  the  hatpin  of  a  woman  in  a  crowded  street  car 
is  too  long,  or  a  new  dance  is  introduced,  or  a  boor 
preempts  a  seat  in  a  train,  or  a  cat  howls  on  the 
back-yard  fence  in  the  night  time,  or  a  waiter  is 
impertinent,  or  the  cook  leaves,  the  indignant  citizen 
lifts  his  eyes  hopefully  toward  that  annual  calamity 
known  as  the  session  of  the  state  legislature,  and 
repeats  the  formula:  "There  ought  to  be  a  law." 
And  when  the  legislature  assembles,  a  whole  body  of 
foolish  bills  is  introduced  regulating  everything  in 
the  earth,  and  some  things  that  are  outside  of  the 
earth.  If  a  deed  is  disapproved  of  by  a  group  of 
people,  an  agitation  is  begun  to  make  it  a  criminal 
offense ;  by  means  of  pains  and  penalties  the  whole  of 
life  is  to  be  regulated,  and  government  is  to 
become  a  vast  bureaucracy  of  policemen,  catch- 
polls, inspectors,  beadles,  censors,  mentors,  monitors 
and  spies.  As  the  session  draws  toward  its  close, 
the  haste  to  enact  all  these  measures  becomes  frantic. 
I  shall  never  forget  those  scenes  of  riot,  the  howling 
and  drunkenness  and  confusion  and  worse  I  have 
witnessed  in  the  legislatures  of  Illinois  and  of  Ohio 
the  last  night  of  the  session.  And  all  this  delirium 
goes  on  in  every  state  of  the  Union,  every  winter — 
and  all  these  enactments  must  be  revered.  It  is  the 
phase  of  the  apotheosis  of  the  policeman,  who  is  to 
replace  nurse  and  parent  and  teacher  and  pastor, 
and,  relieving  all  these  of  their  responsibilities,  un- 
dertake to  remould  man  into  a  being  of  absolute  per- 
fection, in  whom  character  may  be  dispensed  with, 
since  he  is  to  dwell  forever  under  the  crystal  dome 

238 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

of  a  moral  vacuum  from  which  temptation  has  been 
scientifically  exhausted. 

The  reason  is  simple,  and  obvious ;  it  inheres  in 
the  belief  in  the  absolute.  Your  true  reformer  is 
not  only  without  humor,  without  pity,  without 
mercy,  but  he  is  without  knowledge  of  life  or  of 
human  nature,  and  without  very  much  of  any  sort 
of  sweetness  and  light.  The  more  moral  he  is,  the 
harder  he  is,  and  the  more  amazingly  ready  with 
cruel  judgments;  and  he  seldom  smiles  except  with 
the  unction  that  comes  with  the  thought  of  his  own 
moral  superiority.  He  thinks  there  is  an  absolute 
good  and  an  absolute  bad,  and  hence  absolutely  good 
people  and  absolutely  bad  people. 

The  peculiar  and  distinguishing  feature  of  his 
mind  is  that  life  is  presented  to  it  in  stark  and  rigid 
outline.  He  is  blandly  unconscious  of  distinctions; 
he  has  no  perception  of  proportions,  no  knowledge 
of  values,  in  a  word,  no  sense  of  humor.  His  world 
is  made  up  of  wholly  unrelated  antitheses.  There 
are  no  shades  or  shadows,  no  gradations,  no  delicate 
and  subtle  relativities.  A  thing  is  either  black  or 
white,  good  or  bad.  A  deed  is  either  moral  or  im- 
moral, a  virtue  or  a  crime.  It  is  all  very  simple. 
All  acts  of  which  he  does  not  himself  approve  are 
evil;  all  who  do  not  think  and  act  as  he  thinks  and 
acts,  are  bad.  If  you  do  not  know  when  a  deed,  or 
an  opinion  is  wrong,  he  will  tell  you;  and  if  you 
doubt  him  or  differ  with  him,  you  are  bad,  and  it 
is  time  to  call  in  the  police.  "Whenever  the  Com- 
mons has  nothing  else  to  do,"  said  the  wise  old  mem- 
ber of  Parliament,  "it  can  always  make  a  new  crime." 

239 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

Statutes  are  thus  enacted,  as  the  saying  is,  against 
all  evils,  great  and  small,  and  the  greater  the  evil, 
of  course,  the  greater  the  moral  triumph  expressed 
by  the  mere  enactment.  But  because  of  certain  con- 
trarieties in  nature  and  a  certain  obstreperous  qual- 
ity in  human  nature  and  a  general  complexity  in 
life  as  a  whole  these  legal  fulminations  are  frequently 
triumphs  only  in  theory,  and  in  practice  often  inten- 
sify the  very  ills  they  seek  to  cure.  As  the  witty 
Remy  de  Gourmont  says :  Quand  la  morale  triomphe 
il  se  passes  des  choses  tres  vilaines. 

The  more  intensively  developed  specimen  of  the 
type  will  not  overtly  sin  himself,  but  he  loves  to  in- 
spect those  who  do,  and  to  peer  at  them,  and  to  won- 
der how  they  could  ever  have  the  courage  to  do  it; 
he  likes  to  imagine  their  sensations,  and  to  note  each 
one  of  them  as  it  was  developed  in  the  interesting 
experience.  And  hence  the  psychic  lasciviousness  of 
those  who  are  constantly  reporting  plays  and  pic- 
tures as  fit  for  the  censor  they  are  always  clamoring 
for.  Sometimes  they  go  slumming  as  students  of  the 
evils  of  society.  They  are  like  pious  uncles  who 
never  swear  themselves  under  any  circumstances,  but 
relate  stories  of  other  men  who  do,  recite  their  de- 
lightful experiences  and  roll  out  the  awful  oaths  with 
which  the  profane  gave  vent  to  their  feelings  with  a 
relish  that  is  no  doubt  a  relief  to  their  own. 

It  is,  I  suppose,  our  inheritance  from  the  Puri- 
tans, or  the  worst  of  our  inheritance  from  the  Puri- 
tans, and  it  is  possible  that  it  is  worth  while  to 
have  paid  the  penalty  as  a  price  for  the  best  we 
derived  from  them,  since  one  has  to  take  the  bad  with 

240 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

the  good,  though  in  those  days  I  often  wished  that 
the  bequest  had  gone  to  some  other  of  the  heirs. 
Perhaps  in  thus  speaking  of  the  good  we  had  from 
them,  I  am  merely  yielding  to  the  fear  of  saying 
openly  what  I  have  often  thought,  namely,  that  the 
good  we  had  from  the  Puritans  has  been  immensely 
overestimated  and  exaggerated,  and  is  not  one  whit 
better  or  greater  in  quantity  or  influence  than  that 
we  had  from  the  Cavaliers,  or  for  that  matter  from 
the  latest  emigrant  on  Ellis  Island.  They  themselves 
appreciated  their  own  goodness,  and  we  have  always 
taken  their  words  for  granted.  I  have  often  thought 
that  some  day,  when  I  had  the  elegant  leisure  neces- 
sary to  such  a  task,  I  should  like  to  write  "A  His- 
tory of  Puritanism,"  or,  since  I  should  have  to  place 
the  beginnings  of  the  monumental  work  in  Rome  as 
far  back  at  least  as  the  reign  of  the  first  Emperor, 
perhaps  I  should  be  less  ambitious  and  content  my- 
self with  writing  "A  History  of  Puritanism  in  the 
United  States  of  America."  I  should  have  to  begin 
the  larger  work  at  that  interesting  period  of  the  his- 
tory of  Rome  when  the  weary  Augustus  was  being 
elected  and  reelected  president  against  his  will  and 
trying  to  gratify  the  spirit  of  Puritanism  that  was 
even  in  such  people  as  those  Romans,  by  enacting  all 
sorts  of  sumptuary  laws  and  foolish  prohibitions, 
and  trying  out  to  miserable  failures  every  single  one 
of  the  proposals  that  have  since  that  time  been  made 
over  and  over  again  in  the  hope  of  regenerating 
mankind.  The  story  of  how  the  Emperor's  own 
daughter  was  almost  the  first  to  disobey  his  regu- 
lations is  dramatic  enough  to  conclude  rather  than 

241 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

to  begin  any  history,  and  yet  I  could  write  it  with 
much  more  pity  than  I  could  the  story  of  those 
Puritans  who  abounded  in  my  own  locality  in  my 
own  time.  To  write  fairly  and  philosophically  of 
them  I  should  have  to  wait  not  only  for  a  leisure 
so  large  and  so  elegant  that  I  am  certain  never  to 
have  it,  but  I  should  have  to  cultivate  a  philosophic 
calm  which  I  own  with  shame  is  far  from  me  when 
I  think  of  some  of  the  things  they,  or  some  of 
them,  did  in  their  efforts  to  force  their  theories  on 
others.  I  should  not  recall  such  things  now,  and  if 
I  were  to  put  them  in  that  monumental  and  scholarly 
work  of  my  imagination,  it  should  be,  of  course,  only 
in  the  cold  scientific  spirit,  and  as  specimens,  say 
in  nonpariel  type,  at  the  foot  of  the  page  with  the 
learned  annotations. 

XLII 

Speaking  of  this  passion  for  laws  and  regulations 
and  how  some  of  the  zealous  would  order  even  the 
most  private  and  personal  details  of  life  in  these 
states,  Mr.  Havelock  Ellis,  in  a  brilliant  chapter  of 
his  work,  "The  Task  of  Social  Hygiene,"  takes  occa- 
sion to  observe  that  "nowhere  in  the  world  is  there  so 
great  an  anxiety  to  place  the  moral  regulation  of 
social  affairs  in  the  hands  of  police,"  and  that 
"nowhere  are  the  police  more  incapable  of  carrying 
out  such  regulation."  The  difficulty  is  due  of  course 
to  the  fact  that  the  old  medieval  confusion  of  crime 
and  vice  persists  in  a  community  where  the  Puritan 
tradition  still  strongly  survives.     The  incapability, 

242 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

as  has  been  pointed  out,  is  not  so  much  in  the 
policemen  as  in  that  betisse  humaine  which  expects 
such  superhuman  work  of  them. 

This  insistent  confusion  of  vice  with  crime  has 
not  only  had  the  effect  of  fostering  both,  but  is  the 
cause  of  the  corruption  of  the  police.  Their  proper 
function  is  to  protect  life  and  property  and  main- 
tain the  public  peace,  and  this  the  police  of  American 
cities  perform  as  well  as  policemen  anywhere.  But 
when,  by  a  trick  of  the  sectarian  mind,  the  term 
crime  is  made  to  include  all  the  follies  and  weak- 
nesses and  vices  of  humanity,  where  there  is  added 
the  duty  of  enforcing  statutes  against  a  multitude 
of  acts,  some  of  which  only  Puritanical  severity 
classes  as  crimes,  others  of  which  are  regarded  by 
the  human  beings  in  the  community  with  indifference, 
tolerance  or  sympathy,  while  still  others  are  inherent 
in  mysterious  and  imperative  instincts  which  balk 
all  efforts  at  general  control,  the  task  becomes 
wholly  impossible  and  beyond  human  ability. 

The  police  know  it,  and  everybody  knows  it,  and 
it  is  the  hypocrisy  of  society  that  corrupts  them. 
The  police  know,  intuitively,  and  without  any  proc- 
ess of  ratiocination,  that  people  are  human,  and  sub- 
ject to  human  frailties ;  they  are  pretty  human  them- 
selves, and,  in  common  with  most  of  the  people  in 
the  community,  see  no  great  wrong  in  some  of  the 
things  that  are  done  which  the  sumptuary  laws  con- 
demn. Most  of  them,  for  instance,  drink  a  glass  of 
beer  now  and  then,  or  play  a  game  of  cards,  or  go  to 
a  baseball  game  on  Sunday.  They  are  not  apt  to  be 
gentlemen  of  the  most  refined  and  exquisite  tastes. 

243 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

And  it  is  difficult  to  induce  men  to  take  much  interest 
in  punishing  acts  their  own  consciences  do  not  con- 
demn. This,  with  the  situation  at  its  best;  at  its 
worst,  knowing  that,  despite  all  the  enactments  of 
legislatures,  people  will  continue  in  their  hardened 
ways,  they  are  apt  to  abuse  their  power.  For  they 
know,  too,  that  the  statutes  prohibiting  the  merely 
venial  of  those  acts  oftentimes  run  counter  to  the 
urban  custom  and  that  the  community  regards  it  as 
of  no  great  consequence  if  they  are  not  enforced. 
Thus  a  wide  discretion  is  permitted  the  police  by  the 
public  conscience  in  the  discharge  of  their  duties, 
and  this  discretion  is  one  which  quite  humanly  they 
proceed  to  abuse.  If  they  choose,  they  may  enforce 
the  sumptuary  laws  against  certain  persons  or  re- 
frain from  doing  so,  and  the  opportunity  for  corrup- 
tion is  presented.  The  opportunity  widens,  opens 
into  a  larger  field,  and  not  only  does  the  corruption 
spread,  but  it  is  not  long  before  the  police  are  em- 
ploying extra  legal  methods  in  other  directions,  and 
at  last  in  many  instances  establish  an  actual  tyranny 
that  would  not  be  tolerated  in  a  monarchy.  The  re- 
sult is  that  we  read  every  day  of  arbitrary  interfer- 
ences by  policemen  with  most  of  the  constitutional 
rights,  such  as  free  speech,  the  right  of  assembly  and 
petition,  etc.  They  even  set  up  a  censorship  and 
condemn  paintings,  or  prohibit  the  performance  of 
plays,  or  assume  to  banish  women  from  the  streets 
because  they  are  dressed  in  a  style  which  the  police 
do  not  consider  comme  il  faut. 

And  while  the  corruption  is  deplored  and  every- 
where causes  indignation  and  despair,  this  tyranny 

244 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

does  not  seem  to  excite  resistance  or  even  remark; 
the  press,  the  paladium  of  our  liberties,  does  not  of- 
ten protest  against  it,  and  few  seem  to  have  suffi- 
cient grasp  of  the  principle  to  care  anything 
about  it. 

There  is  a  story  somewhere  of  a  little  girl,  home- 
less, supperless,  shivering  in  rags  in  the  cold  rain 
of  the  streets  of  New  York,  and  of  a  passer-by  ob- 
serving in  a  kind  of  sardonic  sympathy: 

"And  she  is  living  under  the  protection  of  sixteen 
thousand  laws !" 

"Ah,  yes,"  said  his  friend,  perhaps  a  professional 
reformer  of  third  persons,  who  naturally  lacked  a 
sense  of  humor;  "but  they  were  not  enforced!" 

It  is  not  altogether  inconceivable  that  if  all  the 
laws  had  been  enforced  the  little  girl's  condition 
would  have  been  even  worse  than  it  was,  considering 
how  haphazard  had  been  the  process  of  making  all 
those  laws,  and  how,  if  set  in  motion,  many  of  them 
would  have  clashed  with  each  other. 

If  they  were  effective,  the  whole  of  human  kind 
would  have  been  translated,  like  Enoch,  long  ago. 
Of  course,  the  assertion  that  they  had  not  been  en- 
forced was  the  obvious  retort.  And  it  was  true,  be- 
cause it  is  impossible  to  enforce  all  of  them.  And 
what  is  more  no  one  believes  that  all  the  laws  should 
be  enforced,  all  the  time, — that  is,  no  one  believes 
in  absolute  law  enforcement,  since  no  one  believes 
that  the  laws  should  be  enforced  against  him.  Every- 
body hates  a  policeman  just  as  everybody  loves  a 
fireman.  And  yet  the  fire  department  and  the  police 
department  are  composed  of  the  same  kind  of  men, 

245 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

paid  the  same  salaries,  and  responsible  to  the  same 
authorities.  The  duty  of  the  fireman  is,  of  course, 
the  simpler,  because  there  is  no  disagreement  among 
men  about  the  thing  to  be  done.  When  a  fire  breaks 
out  in  the  city,  the  fire  department  is  expected  to 
rush  to  the  spot,  to  pour  water  on  the  fire,  and  to 
continue  pouring  water  on  the  fire  until  it  ceases  to 
burn.  The  reforming  mind  seems  to  think  that  the 
duty  of  the  policeman  is  of  equal  simplicity,  and  that 
when  a  wrong  is  done,  the  sole  duty  of  the  police  con- 
sists in  rushing  immediately  to  that  spot,  seizing  the 
wrongdoer,  and,  by  confining  him  in  a  prison,  there- 
by eradicate  his  tendency  to  do  wrong,  and,  by  hold- 
ing him  up  as  an  example  to  others  who  are  consid- 
ering the  commission  of  that  wrong,  to  deter  them 
from  it. 

As  far  as  crimes  are  concerned,  the  policemen, 
indeed,  do  fairly  well.  Though  that  they  succeed 
in  any  measure  at  all  in  discharging  their  func- 
tions is  a  wonder  when  one  considers  the  contumely 
and  abuse  that  are  constantly  heaped  upon  them  in 
all  our  cities.  The  newspapers,  when  there  are  no 
accounts  of  crime  to  print — and  the  assumption  is 
that  crimes  and  casualties,  if  they  are  horrid  enough, 
are  the  principal  events  in  the  annals  of  mankind 
worth  chronicling — can  always  print  suggestions  of 
the  crimes  of  the  police.  The  reporter,  a  human 
being  himself,  dissatisfied  because  the  policemen  can- 
not gratify  his  hunger  for  sensation,  is  not  to  blame, 
perhaps;  he  views  life  from  the  standpoint  of  his 
own  necessities,  and  his  conception  of  life  is  of  a 
series  of  exciting  tragedies  enacted  with  a  view  to 

246 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

making  the  first  edition  interesting,  so  that  the  ears 
of  the  populace  may  be  assaulted  in  the  gloom  of 
each  evening's  dusk  by  that  hideous  bellowing  of  the 
news  "boy,"  whose  heavy  voice  booms  through  the 
shade  like  some  mighty  portent  of  disaster  in  the 
world. 

This  all  sounds  pretty  hopeless,  but  if  morals  are 
to  be  wrought  by  and  through  policemen,  I  am  sure 
we  shall  have  to  pay  higher  salaries,  and  procure 
men  who  are  themselves  so  moral  that  their  con- 
sciences are  troubled  only  by  the  sins  "of  others ; 
there  is  no  other  way.  Unless,  of  course,  anything 
is  left  in  these  modern  days  of  the  theory  of  the 
development  of  individual  character.  But  that  is  the 
program  of  a  thousand  years. 

As  for  the  future  of  municipal  government  in  this 
land,  I  venture  to  set  down  this  prediction :  That  no 
appreciable  advance  will  be  made,  no  appreciable 
advance  can  be  made  in  any  fundamental  sense,  so 
long  as  the  so-called  moral  issue  is  the  pivot  on 
which  municipal  elections  turn,  or  so  long  as  it  is  al- 
lowed to  remain  to  bedevil  officials,  to  monopolize 
their  time  and  to  exhaust  their  energies,  so  that 
they  have  little  of  either  left  for  their  proper  work 
of  administration. 

Either  cities  must  have  home  rule,  including  the 
local  police  power,  with  the  right  to  regulate  amuse- 
ments and  resorts  and  even  vices  according  to  the 
will  of  the  people  in  that  city,  whatever  the  rural 
view  may  be,  or  some  authority  other  than  the 
mayor,  and  far  wiser  and  nobler  than  any  mayor  I 
ever  knew  or  heard  of,  must  be  raised  up  by  the  state 

247 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

in  whom  may  be  united  the  powers  and  functions  of  a 
beadle,  a  censor,  and  a  dictator.  I  have  not  the 
slightest  idea  where  one  so  wise  and  pure  is  to  be 
found,  but  doubtless  there  are  plenty  who  do,  if 
their  modesty  would  permit  them  to  speak. 


XLIII 

I  used  to  recall,  during  the  early  and  acute  phase 
of  this  discussion,  an  incident  that  occurred  in  the 
old  Springfield  days  in  Loami,  down  in  the  Sanga- 
mon country.  The  little  village  in  those  days  could 
boast  an  institution  unlike  any,  perhaps,  in  the  land, 
unless  it  were  to  be  found  in  some  small  hamlet  in  the 
South.  In  the  public  square,  on  a  space  worn 
smooth  and  hard  as  asphalt,  a  great  circle  was 
drawn,  and  here,  every  day  when  the  weather  was 
fine,  a  company  of  old  men  gathered  and  played 
marbles.  What  the  game  was  I  do  not  know; 
some  development  of  one  of  the  boys'  games,  no 
doubt,  but  with  what  improvements  and  embellish- 
ments only  the  old  men  who  understood  and  played 
it  could  say.  Its  enthralled  votaries  played  with 
large  marbles,  which  spun  from  their  gnarled  and 
horny  knuckles  all  day  long,  with  a  shifting  crowd 
of  onlookers  gaping  at  their  prowess.  The  players 
were  old  and  dignified,  and  took  their  sport  seri- 
ously. There  were  to  be  seen,  about  that  big  ring, 
sages  who  had  sat  on  juries  and  been  swayed  by  the 
arguments  of  Lincoln ;  there  were  gray  veterans  who 
had  gone  with  Sherman  to  the  sea  and  had  been  with 

248 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

Grant  at  Appomattox;  and  now,  in  their  declining 
years,  they  found  pleasure  and  a  mildly  stimulating 
excitement  in  this  exercise.  The  skill  they  developed 
in  the  game  is  said  by  those  who  have  studied  the 
subject  on  the  ground  to  have  been  considerable; 
some  testify  that  these  elders  had  raised  their  sport 
to  the  point  of  scientific  dignity,  and  that  the  ability 
they  displayed  ranked  them  as  the  equals  of  golfers 
or  of  billiardists. 

The  exciting  tournaments  went  on  for  years,  the 
old  gentlemen  were  happy,  the  little  village  was 
peaceful  and  contented,  when  suddenly  the  town 
was  shocked  by  a  new  sensation.  Loami  elected  a 
reform  administration.  How  it  came  about  I  do  not 
know;  some  local  muckraker  may  have  practiced  his 
regenerating  art,  or  perhaps  some  little  rivulet  of 
the  reform  wave  just  then  inundating  the  larger 
world  outside  may  have  trickled  down  into  Loami. 
What  privilege  in  the  town  was  menaced  I  do  not 
know ;  what  portion  of  eminent  respectability  felt  its 
perquisites  in  danger  I  cannot  say;  but  Privilege 
seems  to  have  done  what  it  always  does  when  pur- 
sued— namely,  it  began  to  cry  for  the  reformation 
of  persons  instead  of  conditions.  The  new  reform 
mayor,  like  many  another  mayor,  was  influenced; 
and,  looking  about  for  some  one  to  reform,  his  eye 
wandered  out  of  the  window  of  the  town  hall  one 
May  morning  and  lighted  on  the  grizzled  marble- 
players,  and  he  ordered  the  constable  into  action. 

Upon  what  legal  grounds  he  based  his  edict  I 
cannot  say.  It  is  not  vital  for,  as  there  were  about 
sixteen  thousand  laws  then  running  in  his  jurisdic- 

249 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

tion,  it  would  not  have  been  difficult  to  justify  his 
action  on  legal  grounds.  It  will  be  remembered  that 
the  old  men  were  playing  in  the  public  square;  per- 
haps they  played  "for  keeps,"  and  it  may  have  been 
that  there  were  certain  little  understandings  of  a 
speculative  nature  on  the  side.  Above  all,  the  old 
men  were  enjoying  themselves,  and  if  this  were  not 
a  sufficient  offense  what  could  be?  And  if  a  con- 
stable's highest  duty  were  not  to  interfere  with  the 
enjoyment  of  other  folks  what  would  become  of  the 
constitution  and  the  law? 

At  any  rate  the  old  men  were  forbidden  to  play, 
their  game  was  rudely  interrupted,  their  ring  oblit- 
erated, their  marbles  confiscated.  There  was,  of 
course,  resistance;  some  skirmishing  and  scrimmag- 
ing ;  a  heated,  acrimonious  proceeding  in  the  mayor's 
court,  and  afterward  hatred  and  strife  and  bad 
feeling,  the  formation  of  factions,  and  other  condi- 
tions catalogued  under  law  and  order.  But  at 
length  the  space  worn  so  smooth  under  the  trees 
near  the  bandstand  was  sodded,  and  the  old  fellows 
might  gather  in  silent  contemplation  of  a  new  sign, 
"Keep  off  the  Grass,"  and  reflect  upon  this  supreme 
vindication  of  authority. 

But  Loami  is  a  democracy,  or  as  much  of  a  democ- 
racy as  the  state  will  permit  it  to  be,  and  when  the 
next  election  rolled  around  the  old  men  were  alert, 
and  after  an  exciting  contest  they  elected  a  mayor 
of  their  own,  a  liberal.  The  reform  mayor  was  rele- 
gated to  the  political  limbo  of  one-termers,  the 
privileged  few  preserved  their  privileges,  and  the  old 
men,  skinning  the  sod  off  that  portion  of  the  public 

250 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

square,  drew  anew  their  huge  bull-ring,  resumed  their 
game,  and  everybody  was  happy  and  unreformed 
except,  of  course,  the  reformers;  though  perhaps 
they  were  happy,  too,  in  their  restored  misery  of 
having  something  to  complain  about  and  to  wag 
their  heads  over. 

In  relating  this  veracious  little  tale  of  the  lid  of 
Loami,  perhaps  I  have  not  sufficiently  revealed  that 
attitude  of  moral  sympathy  toward  the  good  char- 
acters in  the  story  which  Tolstoy  insists  a  writer 
should  always  assume  and  maintain.  But  this  has 
not  been  due  to  any  want  of  that  sympathy.  In  the 
shadows  of  the  scene  the  figure  of  the  mayor,  for 
instance,  has  ever  been  present — the  keenest  sufferer, 
the  most  unhappy  man  of  them  all.  He  was  the  one 
of  all  of  them  who  was  burdened  with  official  respon- 
sibility; the  marble-playing  faction  was  happy  in 
that  it  had  no  responsibility  save  of  that  light,  arti- 
ficial sort  imposed  by  the  rules  of  its  game ;  its  con- 
science, indeed,  was  untroubled.  The  other  faction 
— the  goo-goos,  or  whatever  they  were  called  in 
Loami — felt  responsible  primarily  for  the  short-com- 
ings of  others ;  their  consciences  were  troubled  only 
by  the  sins  of  other  people,  the  easiest  and  most 
comfortable,  because  it  is  the  most  normal,  position 
that  the  human  conscience  can  assume.  But  the 
mayor  was  held  responsible  for  everything  and  every- 
body, and  in  seeking  to  do  his  duty  he  found  that 
difficulty  which  must  everywhere  increase  in  a  society 
and  a  civilization  which,  in  casting  off  some  of  its 
old  moorings,  recognizes  less  the  responsibility  of 
parent  and  teacher,  not  to  mention  personal  respon- 

251 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

sibility,  and  is  more  and  more  disposed  to  look  to 
the  law  and  its  administrators  as  the  regulators  and 
mentors  of  conduct. 


XLIV 

It  is  an  axiom  of  municipal  politics  that  a  reform 
administration,  or  an  administration  elected  as  a 
protest  against  the  evils  of  machine  government, 
boss  rule,  and  the  domination  of  public  service  cor- 
porations, is  immediately  confronted  by  the  demand 
of  those  who  call  themselves  the  good  people  to 
enforce  all  the  sumptuary  laws  and  to  exterminate 
vice.  That  is,  the  privileged  interests  and  their  allies 
and  representatives  seek  to  divert  the  attention  of 
the  administration  from  themselves  and  their  larger 
and  more  complex  immoralities  to  the  small  and 
uninfluential  offenders,  an  old  device,  always,  in  the 
hope  of  escape,  inspired  by  privilege  when  pursued, 
just  as  friends  of  the  fox  might  turn  aside  the 
hounds  by  drawing  the  aniseed  bag  across  the  trail. 
Many  a  progressive  administration  in  this  land  has 
been  led  into  that  cul  de  sac,  and  as  Mr.  Carl  Hovey 
observed  recently  of  the  neat  saying  to  the  effect 
that  the  way  to  get  rid  of  a  bad  law  is  to  enforce 
it,  the  process  usually  proves  to  be  merely  the  way 
to  get  rid  of  a  good  administration.  The  effort  had 
been  made  by  the  opponents  of  Golden  Rule  Jones 
and  it  had  failed.  It  had  been  attempted  in  the  case 
of  Tom  Johnson  and  it  had  failed,  though  curiously 
enough  the  effort  was  never  made  in  Toledo  or  in 

252 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

Cleveland  or  in  Cincinnati,  or  elsewhere  for  that 
matter,  in  the  days  of  machine  domination.  The 
Puritan  never  lets  his  religion  interfere  with  busi- 
ness. 

I  used  often  to  recall,  in  those  days,  a  witty  say- 
ing of  Mr.  William  Travers  Jerome,  when  he  was 
District  Attorney  in  New  York.  He  said  he  often 
wished  that  there  were  two  volumes  of  the  Revised 
Statutes,  one  to  contain  the  laws  enacted  for  human 
beings,  and  the  other  to  embalm  the  moral  yearnings 
of  rural  communities. 

It  was  disturbing  and  discouraging,  of  course,  to 
feel  that  out  there  in  the  community  there  was  this 
shadowy  mass  of  well  intentioned  people,  the  most 
of  whom  no  doubt,  in  common  with  all  the  rest  of  us, 
did  wish  to  see  moral  improvement,  and  yet  so  mis- 
construed and  misinterpreted  our  efforts.  It  was 
saddening,  too,  because  in  the  work  we  were  trying 
to  do  we  should  have  liked  their  sympathy,  their  in- 
terest and  their  support.  Because  of  their  wider 
opportunity  of  enlightenment  much  better  and 
nobler  things  might  have  been  demanded  of  them, 
but  as  Johnson  Thurston  one  night  pointed  out, 
they  did  not  show  as  much  civic  spirit,  as  much  con- 
cern for  the  common  weal  as  those  of  smaller  oppor- 
tunities, those  bad  people  as  they  called  them  of 
whom  much  less  would  naturally  have  been  expected. 
I  made  a  rule,  as  I  have  already  said  somewhere  in 
these  pages,  not  to  talk  back,  or  to  argue  with 
them.  They  viewed  life  from  the  Puritan  stand- 
point, and  I  suppose  that  I  viewed  it  from  the  pagan 
standpoint.     The  sins  of  others  and  their  mistakes 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

and  failures  never  did  excite  in  me  that  moral  indig- 
nation which  exists  in  the  breasts  of  some;  perhaps 
the  old  distinction  between  bad  people  and  good 
people  had  been  blurred  in  my  consciousness.  I 
could  see  that  the  bad  people  did  many  good  things  in 
their  lives,  and  that  the  good  people  thought  many 
dark  and  evil  thoughts.  I  had  seen  indeed  so  much 
more  kindness  and  consideration,  so  much  more  pity 
and  mercy  shown  by  the  bad  that  I  felt  strengthened 
in  my  philosophy  and  in  my  belief  that  if  their  en- 
vironment could  be  improved,  if  they  could  have  a 
better  chance  in  life,  they  would  be  as  good  as  any- 
body. It  seemed  to  me  that  most  of  the  crime  in 
the  world  was  the  result  of  involuntary  poverty, 
and  the  tremendous,  perhaps  insuperable  task,  was 
to  make  involuntary  poverty  impossible.  But  in  the 
meantime  there  was  other  work  to  be  done.  Aside 
from  the  problem  of  transportation  which  was  but 
one  phase  of  the  great  struggle  between  privilege 
and  the  people,  of  plutocracy  with  democracy,  there 
were  civic  centers,  city  halls,  markets,  swimming 
pools,  bridges  to  be  built,  parks  to  be  improved, 
boulevards  and  parkways  to  be  laid  out,  a  filtra- 
tion plant  to  be  installed,  improvements  in  all  of  the 
other  departments,  a  great  mass  of  wonderful  work 
for  the  promotion  of  the  public  amenities,  the  public 
health,  and  the  adornment  of  the  city,  in  a  word, 
there  was  a  city  to  be  built,  and  strangely  enough 
this  group  of  objectors  of  whom  I  have  been  speak- 
ing, were  so  intensely  preoccupied  with  moral  con- 
siderations that  they  never  had  even  the  slightest  in- 
terest in  these   improvements.      I   think  it  is   this 

254 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

spirit  of  Puritanism  that  has  made  the  cities  of 
America  so  ugly,  or  permitted  them  to  be  ugly; 
such  conceptions  as  beauty  and  ugliness  are  per- 
haps impossible  to  minds  that  know  no  distinction 
but  good  and  bad,  and  for  this  reason  it  has  been 
difficult  to  make  an  aesthetic  appeal  with  any  effec- 
tiveness. 

During  three  of  my  four  terms  in  that  office  the 
nasty  quarrel  about  morals  raged.  As  I  look  back 
and  think  now  with  what  virulence  it  did  rage,  it 
appeals  to  me  as  a  remarkable  psychological  phe- 
nomenon. Of  course  it  was  bad  for  those  who  en- 
gaged in  it,  and  bad  for  the  town  as  well,  for  such 
an  exaggerated  idea  of  conditions  was  given  that  the 
police  in  neighboring  cities,  clever  rogues  that  they 
were,  could  always  excuse  and  exculpate  themselves 
for  any  of  their  delinquencies  by  saying  that  the 
thieves  that  had  come  to  town  hailed  from  Toledo, 
or  that  those  they  could  not  catch  had  gone  and 
taken  refuge  there.  But  I  did  not  engage  in  the 
discussion  nor  permit  the  police  officials  to  do  so. 
There  was  no  time,  since  there  was  so  much  other 
work  to  do,  and  we  went  on  as  well  as  we  could  with 
what  Tom  Johnson  used  to  call  the  policy  of  admin- 
istrative repression,  improving  moral  conditions  with 
such  means  as  we  had.  We  did  succeed  in  eliminat- 
ing the  wine  rooms,  in  closing  the  saloons  at  mid- 
night, and  finally,  after  a  tremendous  effort,  in  extir- 
pating professional  gambling.  It  was  of  no  conse- 
quence that  it  did  not  have  any  effect  upon  criti- 
cism, for  we  did  not  do  it  to  stop  criticism,  and  the 
discussion  went  on  until  I  had  been  elected  for  the 

255 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

third  time,  and  immediately  after  that  election  when 
a  large  majority  of  the  people  had  again  spoken 
their  minds  on  the  subject,  it  was  considered  the 
proper  time  to  reopen  the  discussion  and  to  hold  a 
so-called  civic  revival.  The  young,  uncultured  man 
they  brought  to  town  to  conduct  that  revival,  could 
have  known  nothing  whatever  of  life,  and  was  wholly 
unconscious  of  the  great  economic  forces  which, 
with  so  much  complexity  and  friction,  were  building 
the  modern  city.  He  came  to  call  on  me  before  he 
opened  his  revival  that  he  might  have,  as  he  said,  a 
personal,  private  and  confidential  talk.  When  I 
asked  him  how  the  city  could  be  regenerated,  he  said 
he  did  not  know,  but  this  fact  did  not  prevent  him 
from  telling  the  audiences  he  addressed  that  week 
just  what  should  be  done,  and  that  he,  for  instance, 
could  nobly  do  it,  and  in  the  end  they  sent  a  com- 
mittee to  me  to  tell  me  what  to  do,  if  not  how  to  do 
it.  I  asked  the  committee  to  reduce  their  complaints 
to  writing,  to  point  out  those  evils  which  they  con- 
sidered most  objectionable,  and  to  propose  means 
of  combating  them.  The  committee  went  away  and 
I  confess  I  did  not  expect  to  see  them  again  because 
I  had  no  notion  that  they  could  ever  agree  as  to  the 
particular  evils,  but  after  some  weeks  they  had  come 
to  terms  on  a  few  heads,  and  filed  their  complaint 
pointing  out  several  specific  vices  in  town,  and  as 
a  remedy  proposed  that  they  be  "prevented."  I 
replied  to  them  in  a  letter  in  which  I  said  all  I 
could  think  of  at  that  time  or  all  I  could  think  of 
now  on  this  whole  vexed  problem.  It  was  printed 
in  pamphlet  form  and  rather  widely  circulated,  and 

256 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

finally  published  as  a  little  book.*  I  do  not  know 
that  it  convinced  anybody  who  was  not  convinced 
already.  I  think  we  got  along  a  little  better  after- 
ward than  we  had  before,  and  by  the  time  my  fourth 
term  was  done  the  phenomenon  of  the  discussion,  if 
not  the  vice,  had  disappeared.  After  my  letter  was 
sent  to  the  committee,  it  was  said  that  they  would 
reply  to  it,  but  they  never  did,  and  instead  invited 
the  Reverend  William  A.  Sunday  to  come  to  the  city 
to  conduct  a  revival.  It  was  announced  by  some 
that  he  came  to  assault  our  position,  but  when  he  ar- 
rived Captain  Anson,  the  old  Chicago  baseball 
player,  under  whom  Mr.  Sunday  had  played  baseball 
in  his  younger  days,  happened  to  be  giving  his  mono- 
logue at  a  variety  theater  that  week,  and  he  and  Mr. 
Sunday  together  called  on  me.  I  do  not  know  when 
I  have  had  a  pleasanter  hour  than  that  we  spent 
talking  about  the  old  days  in  Chicago  when  Anson 
had  been  playing  first  base  and  I  had  been  reporting 
the  baseball  games  for  the  old  Herald.  That,  to  be 
sure,  was  after  the  days  of  Billy  Sunday's  services 
in  right  field,  but  it  was  not  too  late  for  me  to  have 
known  and  celebrated  the  prowess  of  that  famous 
infield,  Anson,  Pfeffer,  Williamson  and  Burns,  and 
we  could  celebrate  them  again  and  speculate  as  to 
whether  there  were  really  giants  in  those  days  whose 
like  was  known  on  earth  no  more. 

Mr.  Sunday  conducted  his  revival  with  the  suc- 
cess that  usually  attends  his  efforts  in  that  direction, 
but  he  did  not  mention  me  or  the  administration 


•  "t 


'On  the  Enforcement  of  Law  in   Cities,"   Bobbs-Merrill, 
Indianapolis,  1913. 

257 


"txmTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

until  the  very  close  of  his  visit,  when  he  said  that 
we  were  doing  as  well  as  anybody  could  be  expected 
to  do  under  all  the  circumstances. 


XLV 

When  I  referred  to  the  general  rule  that  police- 
men are  disliked  and  condemned  I  should  have  no- 
ticed certain  exceptions.  The  traffic  squad  for 
instance  is  generally  held  in  a  respect  and  affection 
that  is  part  of  the  civic  pride  of  the  community. 
Those  fine  big  fellows  on  the  corner,  waving  this 
way  or  that  with  a  gesture  the  flowing  traffic  of  the 
street,  are  greeted  with  smiles,  and,  as  they  assist 
in  the  perilous  passage  of  the  thoroughfares,  some- 
times with  thanks  and  benedictions.  The  reason,  of 
course,  is  simple;  they  are  not  engaged  in  hurting 
people,  but  in  helping  people,  and  so  by  the  opera- 
tion of  the  immutable  law,  they  attract  to  them- 
selves the  best  feelings  of  the  people. 

And  this  is  what  we  tried  from  the  first  to  have 
all  our  policemen  do,  to  help  people  and  not  to  hurt 
them.  It  was  what  Jones  had  tried  to  do,  and  he  had 
begun  with  one  of  the  most  interesting  experiments 
in  policing  a  city  that  has  been  made  in  our  country. 
He  took  away  the  clubs  from  the  policemen.  He 
could  have  made  at  first  no  greater  sensation  if  he 
had  taken  away  the  police  altogether,  the  protest 
was  so  loud,  so  indignant,  above  all  so  righteous. 
What  sense  of  security  could  a  community  feel  if 
the  policemen  were  to  have  no  clubs,  how  would  the 

258 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    Y 

unruly  and  the  lawless  be  kept  in  check  when  they  no 
longer  beheld  this  insignia  of  authority  in  the  hands 
of  the  guardians  of  the  peace?  And  perhaps  to 
reassure  the  righteous  and  truly  good  Jones  gave 
the  policemen  canes  and  ran  the  great  risk  of  making 
them  ridiculous. 

I  am  not  sure  that  he  would  have  cared  much  if  he 
had,  since  he  had  so  little  respect  for  the  police  idea, 
and  of  course  he  had  as  little  regard  for  organiza- 
tion. I  remember  once  that  at  a  session  of  the  old 
police  board  he  opposed  the  creation  of  new  ser- 
geants ;  he  said  a  sergeant  always  seemed  as  super- 
fluous to  him  as  a  presiding  elder  in  the  Methodist 
Church.  With  an  elected  board  of  police  commis- 
sioners over  it  the  police  force  was  pretty  certain  to 
be  demoralized,  of  course,  as  is  any  executive  depart- 
ment of  government  which  is  directed  by  a  board,  for 
with  a  board,  unless  all  the  members  save  one  are 
either  dead  or  incapacitated,  discipline  and  efficiency 
are  impossible.  We  got  rid  of  the  board  system  in 
Ohio  after  two  or  three  sessions  of  the  legislature 
had  been  wrestled  with,  and  though  the  "mayor's 
code"  was  never  enacted,  many  of  its  ideas  were 
adopted  in  amendments  to  the  municipal  code,  so 
that  we  approached  the  most  efficient  form  of  city 
government  yet  devised  in  our  rather  close  resem- 
blance to  the  federal  plan. 

The  time  came,  however,  when  the  old  elected 
board  of  public  service  was  succeeded  by  a  director 
of  public  service  appointed  by  the  mayor,  and  the 
old  board  of  public  safety  by  a  director  of  public 
safety  appointed  by  the  same  authority,  though  that 

259 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

was  not  until  I  had  entered  on  my  third  term  in  the 
mayor's  office.  When  that  time  came  I  appointed  as 
Director  of  Public  Service  Mr.  John  Robert  Cowell, 
a  Manxman  who  managed  the  department  of  public 
works  admirably,  and  to  the  post  of  Director  of 
Public  Safety  Mr.  John  Joseph  Mooney,  whose 
services  and  assistance  I  had  already  had  on  the 
board  of  public  safety  when  that  was  appointed  by 
the  mayor.  And  Mr.  Mooney  was  able  to  work  out 
many  of  the  improvements  we  hoped  to  make  in  the 
police  department. 

And  as  Jones  had  taken  the  clubs  away  from  the 
policemen  and  given  them  canes,  we  took  away  the 
canes  and  sent  them  forth  with  empty  hands.  Jones 
had  the  idea  of  doing  away  with  clubs  from  London 
where  he  observed  the  bobbies  who  control  the 
mighty  traffic  in  the  streets  of  London.  We  were 
therefore  able  to  realize  the  whole  of  his  ideal  in  that 
respect,  and  our  city,  I  think  alone  of  all  American 
cities,  could  not  merit  the  reproach  that  a  Liverpool 
man  once  made  to  me  when  we  were  discussing  super- 
ficial appearances  in  the  two  nations.  "The  most  of- 
fensive thing  in  America  to  me,"  he  said,  "is  the 
way  in  which  the  policemen  parade  their  trunch- 
eons." The  public  made  no  complaint  at  the  disap- 
pearance of  the  canes,  but  the  policemen  did;  they 
felt  lost,  they  reported,  without  something  to  twirl 
in  their  hands.  We  thought  of  letting  them  have 
swagger  sticks,  but  finally  decided  that  they  should 
be  induced  to  bear  themselves  gracefully  with  their 
white  gloved  hands  unoccupied.  The  white  gloves 
were  the  subject  of  amusement  to  the  boors  in  town, 

260 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

who  could  always  be  amused  at  any  effort  at  im- 
provement, but  with  them  on,  and  the  new  uniforms 
we  had  patterned  after  the  uniform  worn  by  the 
New  York  policemen,  the  members  of  the  department 
soon  began  to  have  a  pride  in  themselves. 

And  that  was  exactly  what  we  were  trying  to  in- 
culcate, though  it  was  difficult  to  do,  and  almost 
impossible,  one  might  think,  since  for  generations 
policemen  have  been  the  target  for  the  sarcasms  and 
abuse  of  every  voice  of  the  community.  The  wonder 
is,  with  such  an  universal  conspiracy  as  exists  in 
America  to  give  policemen  a  bad  name,  that  they 
have  any  character  left  at  all.  Surely  each  commu- 
nity in  various  ways  has  done  everything  it  could  to 
strip  its  policemen  of  every  shred  of  reputation  and 
self  respect  and  with  these  gone,  character  might  be 
expected  shortly  to  follow.  Of  course  the  new  uni- 
forms were  ridiculed  too,  but  we  did  not  let  that 
discourage  us. 

There  was  the  civil  service  law  to  help,  and  we 
were  of  old  devoted  to  the  spirit  and  even  to  the 
letter  of  that,  though  once  the  letter  of  that  law 
compelled  us  to  an  injustice,  as  the  letter  of  any 
law  must  do  now  and  then.  We  had  reorganized 
the  police  department  on  a  metropolitan  basis,  and 
had  done  the  same  with  the  fire  department,  and  in 
this  department  there  were  accordingly  created  three 
new  positions  of  battalion  chiefs,  for  which  captains 
were  eligible.  The  oldest  ranking  captain  in  the 
department  was  Dick  Lawler,  by  everyone  in  the 
department  from  the  chief  down  conceded  to  be  the 
best  fireman  in  the  department,  with  a  long  and 

261 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

untarnished  record  of  devoted  duty  and  quiet,  unas- 
suming bravery.  And  it  was  his  natural  ambition  to 
round  out  that  career  as  one  of  the  chiefs.  The 
examining  board  held  a  written  test,  and  as  Lawler 
was  more  accomplished  in  extinguishing,  or,  as  his 
comrades  expressed  it,  in  fighting  fire,  and  much 
more  comfortable  and  at  home  on  the  roof  of  a  burn- 
ing building  than  he  was  at  a  desk  with  a  pen  in  his 
hand,  he  did  not  do  very  well.  When,  for  instance, 
he  read  a  long  hypothetical  question,  setting  forth 
certain  conditions  at  a  fire  and  asking  the  applicant 
where,  under  such  circumstances,  he  would  lay  the 
hose,  Lawler  wrote  down  as  his  answer,  "Where  it 
would  do  the  most  good,"  and  on  that  answer  the 
board  marked  him  zero.  The  board  marked  him  zero 
on  so  many  answers  indeed  that  the  net  result  was 
almost  zero,  and  he  failed. 

It  was  a  kind  of  tragedy,  in  its  little  way,  as 
he  stood  in  my  office  that  morning  on  which  he  came 
to  appeal  from  the  board,  with  tears  in  his  eyes. 
But  the  law  was  obdurate  and  I  was  helpless.  But  I 
did  point  out  to  the  examining  board  the  absurdity 
of  such  methods  of  testing  a  man's  ability,  and  after 
that  they  allowed  a  man's  record  to  count  for  fifty 
per  cent.  And  it  was  not  long  until  a  vacancy  oc- 
curred among  the  chiefs — and  Lawler  was  appointed. 


XLVI 

The   questions  put   to   Lawler   were  perhaps   no 
more  absurd  than  many  a  one  framed  by  civil  serv- 

262 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

ice  examiners.  In  any  event  the  written  examina- 
tion is  apt  to  do  as  much  harm  as  good,  and  for 
policemen  and  firemen  we  came  to  the  conclusion 
that  it  was  almost  wholly  worthless,  once  it  had 
been  determined  that  an  applicant  could  write  well 
enough  to  turn  in  an  intelligible  report.  The  initial 
qualification  on  which  we  came  to  rely  and  to  re- 
gard as  most  important  was  the  physical  qualifica- 
tion. There  is  no  way  to  tell  by  asking  a  man  ques- 
tions whether  he  will  be  a  good  policeman  or  not; 
the  only  way  to  find  that  out  is  to  try  him  for  a 
year.  But  his  physical  condition  can  be  determined, 
and  on  this  basis  we  began  to  build  the  police  force, 
under  the  direction  of  Dr.  Peter  Donnelly,  one  of 
the  ablest  surgeons  in  the  country,  whose  tragic 
early  death  was  seemingly  but  a  part  of  that  fate 
which  took  from  us  in  a  few  short  years  so  many 
of  the  best  and  brightest  of  the  young  men  in  our 
movement.  The  death  of  Peter  Donnelly  left  us 
desolate  because  he  had  a  genius  for  friendship  equal 
to  that  genius  as  a  surgeon  which  enabled  him  to 
render  a  great  social  service. 

He  was  perfectly  rigid  in  the  examinations  to 
which  he  subjected  applicants  for  positions  in  the 
department,  and  wholly  inaccessible  to  any  sort  of 
influence  in  favor  of  the  unfit.  In  the  old  days, 
which  by  many  were  regretted  as  the  good  old  days, 
the  only  qualification  an  applicant  needed  was  a 
friend  on  the  police  board,  and  as  a  result  the  force 
was  encumbered  with  the  lame,  the  halt,  and  the 
blind;  there  were  drinkers  if  not  drunkards  among 
them,  and  the  paunches  which  some  bore  before  them 

263 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

were  so  great  that  when  they  took  their  belts  off  and 
hung  them  up  in  those  resorts  where  they  accepted 
the  hospitality  of  a  midnight  meal,  the  belts  seemed 
to  be  as  large  as  the  hoops  of  the  Heidelberg  tun. 
We  rid  the  force  of  these  as  quickly  as  it  could  be 
done,  and  the  recruits  who  replaced  them  were,  be- 
cause of  Dr.  Donnelly's  care  and  service,  superb 
young  fellows,  lithe  and  clean,  who  bore  themselves 
with  self  respect  and  an  ardent  pride  in  that  esprit 
de  corps  we  were  enabled  to  develop. 

But  before  that  spirit  could  exist  there  were  de- 
fects other  than  physical  that  must  be  removed; 
there  were  old  jealousies  and  animosities,  some  of  a 
religious,  or  rather  a  theological  nature — relic  of  an 
old  warfare  between  the  sects  that  once  devastated 
the  town  with  its  unreasoning  and  remorseless  and 
ignorant  hatred;  a  St.  Patrick's  day  had  once  been 
celebrated  by  dismissing  a  score  or  more  of  Irish- 
men from  the  police  department.  There  were  other 
differences  of  race  origin,  and  in  doing  away  with  all 
these,  so  far  as  it  could  be  done,  Mr.  Mooney,  the 
Director  of  Public  Safety,  had  to  his  assistance  the 
ability  and  the  tact  of  two  crusted  old  characters  on 
the  force,  one  of  them  the  Chief  of  Police,  Perry  D. 
Knapp,  and  the  other  Inspector  John  Carew,  whose 
hair  had  so  whitened  in  the  days  he  served  the  city 
as  a  detective  that  he  was  called  Silver  Jack.  He 
was  one  of  the  ablest  detectives  anywhere,  though 
prejudice  and  jealousy  had  kept  him  down  for  a 
long  time.  I  had  known  him  in  my  youth,  and  later 
in  the  courts,  and  now  that  I  had  the  chance  I  put 
him  at  the  head  of  the  detective  department,  and 

264 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

when  I  was  tired  of  the  troubles  which  harassed  him 
and  me  during  the  day,  I  tried  sometimes  to  forget 
them  at  night  by  writing  stories  in  which  he  figured 
as  the  clever  detective  he  was. 

And  as  for  Perry  Knapp,  I  suppose  there  was  not 
another  chief  of  police  like  him  anywhere.  Over  his 
desk  was  a  picture  of  Walt  Whitman,  and  in  his 
heart  was  the  love  for  humanity  that  Whitman  had, 
and  in  his  library  were  well  read  copies  of  Emerson 
and  a  collection  of  Lincolniana  I  have  often  envied 
him.  He  had  served  in  close  association  with  Jones, 
who  had  made  his  position  difficult  by  promoting  him 
over  the  heads  of  others  in  the  department  who 
ranked  him,  and  he  was  the  heir  of  all  the  old  dis- 
trust of  Jones's  attitude  toward  life.  Nevertheless, 
he  found  a  way  to  apply  Jones's  theories  to  the 
policing  of  a  city  without  any  of  that  ostentation 
which  in  some  cases  has  brought  such  methods  into 
disfavor.  I  cannot,  of  course,  describe  his  whole 
method,  but  he  was  always  trying  to  help  people 
and  not  to  hurt  them.  He  established  a  system  by 
which  drunken  men  were  no  longer  arrested,  but, 
when  they  could  not  be  taken  home  as  were  those 
club  members  with  whom  he  tried  in  that  respect  at 
least  to  put  them  on  a  parity,  they  were  cared  for  at 
police  headquarters  until  morning,  and  then  with 
a  bath  and  a  breakfast,  allowed  to  go  without  leav- 
ing behind  to  dog  their  footsteps  that  most  dreadful 
of  all  fates,  a  "police  record."  No  one  will  ever 
know  how  many  poor  girls  picked  up  in  police  raids 
he  saved  from  the  life  to  which  they  had  been  tempted 
or  driven,  by  sending  them  back  to  their  homes  when 

265 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

they  had  homes,  or  in  some  manner  finding  for  them 
a  way  out  of  their  troubles.  And  I  shall  always  re- 
member with  a  pleasure  that  there  is  such  good  in 
humanity  after  all,  when  I  recall  that  boy  in  the 
workhouse  whom  a  father  in  a  far-off  city  was  seek- 
ing. The  boy  was  working  with  other  prisoners  on 
a  bit  of  public  work  in  one  of  the  parks  that  winter 
morning,  and  after  he  had  secured  a  parole,  the 
Chief  drove  out  to  the  park,  and  got  the  boy, 
clothed  him  with  garments  he  had  bought  himself, 
bought  a  railway  ticket  and  sent  the  boy  away  to 
Chicago  and  his  home.  If  he  had  waited  until  the 
lad  was  brought  in  at  night,  he  explained,  the  old 
man  would  have  lost  a  whole  day  of  his  son's  com- 
panionship ! 

That  is  what  I  mean  when  I  say  that  a  govern- 
ment should  be  made  human,  or  part  of  what  I  mean ; 
such  incidents  are  specifically  noticeable  because  they 
stand  out  in  such  contrast  against  the  hard  surface 
of  that  inhuman  institutionalism  the  reformers  with 
their  everlasting  repressions  and  denials  and  nega- 
tives are  trying  to  make  so  much  harder.  Charley 
Stevens,  the  old  circus  man  whom  I  appointed  as 
Superintendent  of  the  Workhouse,  very  successfully 
applied  the  same  principle  to  the  management  of 
that  institution,  which  he  conducted  with  his  humor 
and  quaint  philosophy  more  than  by  any  code  of 
rules.  He  usually  referred  to  his  prison  as  the  Tem- 
ple of  Thought,  and  he  abolished  from  it  all  the 
marks  of  a  prison,  such  as  stripes  and  close  cropped 
polls,  and  all  that  sort  of  thing.  He  was  criticized, 
of  course,  since  the  conventional  notion  is  that  pris- 

266 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

oners  should  be  made  to  appear  as  hideous  as  possi- 
ble ;  I  am  pretty  sure  that  reformer  disapproved  who 
one  Sunday  afternoon  went  down  there  and  asked 
the  superintendent  if  he  would  permit  him  to  preach 
to  the  inmates  and  was  told  by  Stevens  that  he  would 
like  to  accommodate  him,  but  that  he  could  not  just 
then  break  up  the  pedro  game.  There  were  those 
who  said  that  he  was  making  it  too  easy  for  the 
prisoners,  and  yet  every  now  and  then  some  of  them 
would  escape,  and  when  they  were  brought  back,  as 
they  usually  were,  they  were  met  only  with  re- 
proaches and  asked  why  they  could  not  leave  their 
addresses  when  they  went  away  so  that  their  mail 
could  be  forwarded.  There  were,  however,  two  es- 
caping prisoners  who  never  were  returned.  They 
got  away  just  in  time  to  make  a  sensation  for  the 
noon  editions  of  the  newspapers,  and  as  I  was  on 
my  way  to  luncheon  I  met  Stevens,  standing  on 
the  street  corner,  very  calmly,  while  the  newsboys 
were  crying  in  our  ears  the  awful  calamity  that 
had  befallen  society.  When  I  asked  what  he  was 
doing,  he  said  that  he  was  hunting  the  escaped  pris- 
oners. "I've  been  to  the  Secor  and  the  Boody 
House,"  he  said,  naming  two  leading  hotels,  "and 
they're  not  there.  I'm  going  over  to  the  Toledo 
Club  now,  and  if  they're  not  there,  I  don't  know 
where  to  look  for  them." 

It  may  be  that  in  these  little  incidents  I  give  the 
impression  that  he  was  a  trifler,  but  that  is  not  the 
case.  He  knew,  of  course,  that  so  far  as  doing  any 
good  whatever  in  the  world  is  concerned,  our  whole 
penal  system  is  a  farce  at  which  one  might  laugh 

267 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

if  it  did  not  cause  so  many  tears  to  be  shed  in  the 
world.  But  he  did  try  to  be  kind  to  the  inmates, 
and  by  the  operation  of  the  parole  system  succeeded 
to  an  extent  commensurate  with  that  attained  by 
Dr.  Cooley  of  Cleveland.  Of  course  it  was  all  done 
under  the  supervision  of  Mr.  Mooney,  the  Director 
of  Public  Safety,  who  rightly  characterized  our 
whole  penal  system  when  he  said: 

"Whenever  you  send  one  to  prison  you  send  four 
or  five;  you  send  a  man's  wife  and  his  mother,  and 
his  sister  and  his  children,  who  are  all  innocent,  and 
you  never  do  him  any  good." 

But  the  workhouse,  though  under  Mr.  Mooney's 
direction,  was  not  connected  with  the  police  depart- 
ment, except  in  the  archaic  minds  of  those  who 
thought  if  we  were  only  harsh  and  hard  enough  in 
our  use  of  both,  we  could  drive  evil,  or  at  least  the 
appearance  of  evil,  out  of  the  city,  and  leave  it, 
standing  like  a  rock  of  morality,  in  the  weltering 
waste  of  immorality  all  about  us. 

XLVII 

In  no  respect  has  the  utter  impotence  of  medieval 
machinery  in  suppressing  vice  been  more  definitely 
proved  than  in  the  great  failure  of  society  in  deal- 
ing with  what  is  called  the  social  evil.  Whenever 
my  mind  runs  on  this  subject,  as  anyone's  mind 
must  in  the  present  recrudescence  of  that  Puritan- 
ism which  never  had  its  mind  on  anything  else,  I 
invariably  think  of  Golden  Rule  Jones  and  the  in- 
cidents   in   that   impossible   warfare   which   worried 

268 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

him  into  a  premature  grave.  He  was  an  odd  man, 
born  so  far  out  of  his  time  that  the  sins  of  others 
never  troubled  his  conscience.  He  was  so  great,  and 
knew  so  much  of  life,  more  perhaps  than  he  did  of 
history,  on  every  page  of  which  he  would  have  found 
the  confirmations  of  the  opinions  life  had  taught 
him,  that  he  divined  all  lewdness,  all  obscenity  to  be 
subjective  and  not  objective,  so  that  he  found  less 
to  abhor  in  the  sins  of  the  vicious  than  in  the  state 
of  mind  of  their  indefatigable  accusers  and  pursuers. 
And  he  had  his  own  way  of  meeting  their  complaints. 
Once  a  committee  of  ladies  and  gentlemen  called 
upon  him  with  the  demand  that  he  obliterate  the 
social  evil,  off-hand  and  instantly.  They  were  sim- 
ple, brief  and  to  the  point.  They  informed  him 
that  the  laws  providing  for  chastity  were  being 
broken,  that  there  were  prostitutes  in  the  city,  and 
in  short,  urged  him  to  put  a  stop  to  it. 

"But  what  am  I  to  do?"  he  inquired.  "These 
women  are  here." 

"Have  the  police,"  they  said,  a  new,  simple  and 
happy  device  suddenly  occurring  to  them,  "drive 
them  out  of  town  and  close  up  their  houses !"  They 
sat  and  looked  at  him,  triumphantly. 

"But  where  shall  I  have  the  police  drive  them? 
Over  to  Detroit  or  to  Cleveland,  or  merely  out  into 
the  country?  They  have  to  go  somewhere,  you 
know." 

It  was  a  detail  that  had  escaped  them,  and 
presently,  with  his  great  patience,  and  his  great 
sincerity,  he  said  to  them: 

"I'll  make  you  a  proposition.  You  go  and  select 
269 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

two  of  the  worst  of  these  women  you  can  find,  and 
I'll  agree  to  take  them  into  my  home  and  provide  for 
them  until  they  can  find  some  other  home  and  some 
other  way  of  making  a  living.  And  then  you,  each 
one  of  you,  take  one  girl  into  your  home,  under  the 
same  conditions,  and  together  we'll  try  to  find  homes 
for  the  rest." 

They  looked  at  him,  then  looked  at  each  other,  and 
seeing  how  utterly  hopeless  this  strange  man  was, 
they  went  away. 

XL  VIII 

To  be  sure,  that  was  in  another  day.  Prostitu- 
tion had  not  become  a  subject  for  polite  conversa- 
tion at  the  dinner  table;  pornographic  vice  com- 
missions had  not  been  organized  and  provided  with 
appropriations  so  that  their  hearings  might  be  sten- 
ographically  reported  and  published  along  with  the 
filthy  details  gathered  in  the  stews  and  slums  of  cities 
by  trained  smut  hunters ;  it  had  not  yet  been  dis- 
covered that  the  marriage  ceremony  required  a  new 
introduction,  based  upon  the  scientific  investigations 
of  the  clinical  laboratory,  and  on  the  same  brilliant 
thought  that  centuries  ago  struck  the  wise  men  of 
Bohemia,  who,  when  the  population  increased  too 
rapidly,  prohibited  marriages  for  a  number  of  years 
that  proved,  of  course,  to  be  the  most  prolific  the 
land  had  ever  known. 

The  new  conception  was  created  in  a  moment,  in 
the  twinkling  of  an  eye,  by  the  necromancy  of  a 
striking  phrase.     I  do  not  know  who  it  is  that  had 

270 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

the  felicity  to  employ  it  first  in  its  present  relation. 
I  remember  that  long  years  ago,  when  as  a  boy  I  used 
to  frequent  the  gallery  of  the  theater,  I  sat  rapt 
afar  in  the  mystery  and  romance  of  life  on  the 
Mississippi  while  gazing  on  the  scenes  of  Bartley 
Campbell's  melodrama  "The  White  Slave."  I  can 
call  back  now,  with  only  a  little  effort  of  the  imagi- 
nation and  the  will,  that  wonderful  pageant — the 
Natchez,  the  Robert  E.  Lee,  the  great  steamboats 
I  knew  so  well  from  Mark  Twain's  book,  the  planta- 
tion hands,  the  darkies  singing  on  the  levee,  the 
moonlight  and  the  jasmine  flower — and  there  was 
no  David  Belasco  in  those  days  to  set  the  scene 
either,  nor,  for  the  imagination  of  youth,  any  need 
of  one!  And  then  the  beautiful  octoroon,  so  lily 
white  and  fragile  that  it  should  have  been  patent  to 
all,  save  perhaps  an  immoral  slave-holder,  from  the 
very  first  scene,  that  she  had  no  drop  of  negro  blood ! 
And  the  handsome  and  cruel  owner  and  master,  with 
his  slouch  hat  and  top  boots,  and  fierce  mustache 
and  imperial,  taking  her  to  her  awful  fate  down  the 
river!  It  was  an  old  story  Bartley  Campbell  used 
for  his  plot,  a  story  which  had  for  me  an  added 
interest,  because  my  grandfather  had  told  it  to  me 
out  of  his  own  southern  experiences,  in  those  far-off 
days  when  he  had  business  that  took  him  down  the 
river  to  New  Orleans.  And  it  was  a  story  which, 
for  a  while,  in  many  variants  of  its  original  form, 
was  told  all  over  the  land  to  illustrate  the  immorality 
of  slavery.  I  suspect  that  it  was  not  altogether 
true  in  its  dramatic  details;  surely  no  such  number 
of  lovely  and  innocent  creatures  were  permitted  to 

271 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

fling  themselves  into  the  Mississippi  from  the  hur- 
ricane decks  of  steamboats  as  the  repetitions  and 
variations  of  that  tale  would  indicate ;  it  would  have 
been  altogether  too  harrowing  to  the  voyagers, 
some  few  of  whom  at  least  must  have  been  virtuous, 
and  journeyed  up  and  down  on  peaceful  moral  mis- 
sions of  one  sort  and  another.  No  doubt  it  was 
symbolic  of  a  very  wrong  condition,  and  I  suppose 
that  is  what  justified  it  in  the  minds  of  those  who 
told  it  over  and  over  without  the  trouble  of  verify- 
ing its  essential  details.  It  was  a  good  story,  and 
in  the  hands  of  Mr.  Howells  it  made  a  good  poem, 
and  it  made  surely  a  pretty  good  play,  which,  could 
it  enthrall  me  now  as  once  it  did  by  its  enchantments, 
I  should  like  to  see  again  to-night ! 

But  I  doubt  if  I  could  sit  through  any  one  of  the 
plays  that  have  been  written  or  assuredly  are  to  be 
written  about  the  white  slaves  of  to-day.  The  plot 
has  been  right  at  hand  in  the  tale  that  has  gone 
the  rounds  of  two  continents,  and  resembles  that 
elder  story  so  closely  in  its  incidents  of  abduction 
that  I  presume  the  adapter  of  its  striking  title  to 
the  exigencies  of  current  reform  must  have  been  old 
enough  to  recognize  its  essential  similarity  to  the 
parent  tradition.  It  was  told  in  books,  it  served 
to  ornament  sermons  'and  addresses  on  sociological 
subjects,  and  it  has,  I  believe,  already  been  done  in 
novels  that  are  among  the  best  sellers.  The  news- 
papers printed  it  with  all  its  horrific  details;  it  was 
so  precisely  the  sort  of  pornography  to  satisfy  the 
American  sense  of  news — a  tale  of  salacity  for  the 
prurient,  palliated  and  rendered  aseptic  by  efforts  of 

272 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

officials,  heated  to  the  due  degree  of  moral  indigna- 
tion, to  bring  the  concupiscent  to  justice.  I  had 
been  in  England,  too,  when  the  subject  was  under 
discussion  there,  and  this  same  story  was  told  to 
such  effect  that  Parliament,  as  hysterical  as  one 
of  our  own  state  legislatures,  had  been  led  to  restore 
the  brutality  of  flogging.  It  was  always  the  same: 
some  poor  girl  had  been  abducted,  borne  off  to  a 
brothel,  ruined  by  men  employed  for  that  purpose, 
turned  over  to  aged  satyrs,  and  never  heard  of  more. 
Of  course  there  were  variations ;  sometimes  the  girl 
was  lured  away  in  a  motor  car,  sometimes  by  a 
request  for  assistance  to  some  lady  who  had  fainted, 
sometimes  by  other  ruses.  The  story  was  always 
told  vehemently,  but  on  the  authority  of  some  inac- 
cessible third  person,  to  doubt  or  question  whom 
was  to  be  suspected  of  sympathy  with  the  outrage. 
But  however  high  the  station,  or  unimpeachable  the 
character  of  the  informants,  anyone  who  had  the 
slightest  knowledge  of  the  rules  of  evidence,  unless 
he  were  especially  credulous,  would  have  reason  to 
doubt  the  tales.  In  Toledo  it  had  its  vogue.  It  went 
the  rounds  of  gentlemen's  clubs  and  the  tea  tables 
of  the  town,  and  in  the  curious  way  stories  have,  it 
went  on  and  on  with  new  embellishments  at  each 
repetition.  I  had  a  curiosity  about  it,  not  because 
I  cared  for  the  realistic  details  that  might  as  Pooh 
Bah  used  to  say,  "lend  an  air  of  artistic  verisimili- 
tude to  an  otherwise  bald  and  unconvincing  narra- 
tive," but  because  here  was  a  chance  to  test  it  at 
first  hand,  and  so  I  asked  the  person  most  heroically 
concerned  to  come  and  tell  me  of  an  experience  that 

273 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

had  earned  for  him  the  plaudits  of  many  of  his  fellow 
citizens  and  citizenesses.  And  so  he  came.  He  was 
a  social  worker,  as  they  are  called,  and  had  had  the 
training  in  settlement  work  which  is  said  to  qualify 
young  persons  to  deal  professionally  with  the  poor 
and  wicked.  He  was  a  rather  good  looking  young 
chap,  with  a  smile  about  his  full  red  lips,  who  lifted 
his  mild  eyes  to  yours  with  perhaps  an  effort  at 
frankness  too  pronounced.  He  spoke  well  and 
fluently. 

One  night  (he  said)  at  the  close  of  a  hard  day's 
work  in  his  mission,  a  man  came  to  him  in  evident 
distress.  The  man  was  a  business  man,  in  comfort- 
able though  modest  circumstances,  with  a  family  of 
which  perhaps  the  most  interesting  member  was  a 
beautiful  girl  of  seventeen.  The  girl  was  attending 
a  high  school,  where  she  was  in  one  of  the  advanced 
classes,  and  the  evening  before  had  gone  from  school 
to  spend  the  night  at  the  home  of  a  friend,  a  girl  of 
her  own  age.  The  next  evening,  on  her  failure  to 
return  home,  the  parents  became  alarmed,  and  after 
unavailing  inquiry  at  her  schoolmate's  house,  and  in 
other  quarters,  the  distraught  father  had  appealed 
to  the  social  worker.  The  social  worker  at  once 
caused  an  investigation  to  be  made,  and  by  a  process 
of  elimination  (as  he  said,  though  unlike  Sherlock 
Holmes,  he  did  not  detail  the  successive  steps  of  his 
logic),  he  concluded  that  the  girl  was  in  a  certain 
quarter  of  the  city,  in  fact  in  a  certain  street.  He 
then  sent  for  the  father,  told  him  to  supply  himself 
with  sufficient  money,  instructed  him  in  the  part  he 
was  to  play,  and  was  careful  to  stipulate  that  if  he, 

274 


FORTY   YEARS    OF   IT 

the  social  worker,  were  to  feign  drunkenness  or  to 
indulge  in  conduct  out  of  keeping  with  his  character, 
the  father  was  patiently  and  trustingly  to  await 
results.  Thereupon  they  set  forth,  and  before  mid- 
night visited  some  thirty  houses  of  ill  fame.  In  the 
thirty-first  house  the  suspicions  of  the  social  worker 
were  confirmed,  and,  pretending  to  be  intoxicated, 
he  invited  an  inmate  to  accompany  him,  and  ascended 
to  the  upper  floor.  He  tried  the  doors  along  the 
hall,  and  finding  them  all  open  but  one,  and  that 
locked,  he  lurched  against  it,  broke  it  open,  and  on 
entering  the  room  surprised  a  young  woman,  entirely 
nude,  who  screamed — until  he  muttered  some  word 
of  understanding  and  encouragement.  Meanwhile 
the  inmate  had  summoned  madame  the  proprietress, 
who  flew  up  the  stairs,  burst  into  the  room  and  emp- 
tied her  revolver  at  the  social  worker. 

The  social  worker,  at  this  supreme  moment  in  his 
recital,  paused,  and  with  a  weary  but  reassuring 
smile,  as  who  should  say  such  adventures  were  diur- 
nal monotonies  in  his  life,  remarked:  "with  no  dam- 
age, however,  to  anything  but  the  furniture  and  the 
woodwork." 

But  he  had  the  girl  in  his  arms,  and,  thrusting 
aside  foiled  madame  and  the  inmate,  bore  his  charge 
down  stairs,  snatched  a  raincoat  from  the  hall  rack, 
wrapped  it  about  her,  called  to  the  father  to  come, 
and  escaped  into  the  street. 

After  the  rescued  girl  had  been  restored  to  her 
ihome,  and  sufficiently  recovered  from  her  terrible 
experience  to  give  a  connected  account  of  herself,  she 
related  the  following  incidents:     Leaving  school  on 

275 


FORTY   YEARS    OF   IT 

that  night  she  had  started  for  the  home  of  the  girl 
whom  she  was  to  visit — the  girl  not  having  attended 
school  that  day — and  while  passing  a  house  in  a 
respectable  residential  district,  about  five  o'clock  of 
the  winter  evening,  darkness  already  having  fallen, 
a  woman  came  to  the  door  and  in  great  distress  told 
the  girl  that  a  baby  was  sick,  that  she  was  alone, 
and  implored  the  girl  to  come  in  and  care  for  the 
baby  while  she  ran  for  a  doctor.  The  girl  complied, 
and  on  reaching  the  door,  was  immediately  seized, 
drawn  into  the  hallway,  her  cries  smothered  by  a 
hand  in  which  there  was  a  handkerchief  saturated 
with  chloroform,  and  she  knew  no  more  until  she  re- 
gained consciousness  in  the  place  where  the  social 
worker  had  rescued  her. 

Here  his  direct  recital  ended.  I  put  to  him  two 
or  three  questions:  Who  is  the  girl?  Where  is  she 
now?  Where  is  the  house  into  which  she  was  be- 
guiled? Where  is  the  brothel  in  which  she  was 
imprisoned?  He  had  answers  for  all  these.  The 
girl's  name  could  not  be  divulged,  even  in  official 
confidence,  for  the  family  could  not  risk  publicity; 
the  house  where  she  had  been  summoned  to  care  for 
the  ailing  baby  was  the  home  of  wealthy  and  re- 
spectable people,  who  had  been  out  of  town  at  the 
time,  and  their  residence  had  been  broken  into  and 
used  temporarily  by  the  white  slavers.  As  for  the 
brothel,  the  social  worker,  by  methods  he  did  not 
disclose,  had  compelled  the  proprietress  to  leave  the 
city,  and  the  place  was  closed. 

Such  was  the  amazing  adventure  of  the  social 
worker.    It  was  easy  to  imagine  the  effect  of  it  when 

276 


FORTY   YEARS    OF   IT 

related  to  neurotic  women,  to  prurient  and  senti- 
mental men,  and  in  country  churches  to  gaping 
yokels  curious  about  "life"  in  the  city.  It  was  easy 
to  understand  the  effect  it  would  have  on  minds 
starved  and  warped  by  Puritanism,  ready  for  any 
sensation,  especially  one  that  might  stimulate  their 
moral  emotions,  and  give  them  one  more  excuse  for 
condemning  the  police.  No  wonder  certain  of  the 
elect  brethren  in  gratitude  for  having  been  told  just 
what  they  wished  to  hear  had  contributed  hundreds 
of  dollars,  that  the  "work"  might  go  on ! 

I  determined,  therefore,  that  in  one  instance,  at 
least,  the  truth  as  to  this  stock  story  should  be  dis- 
covered, and  I  requested  Mr.  Mooney,  the  Director 
of  Public  Safety,  to  make  a  complete  investigation. 
He  detailed  to  the  task  the  best  of  his  detectives; 
the  inspectors  of  the  federal  government  under  the 
white  slave  laws  were  called  in,  and  I  asked  two 
clergymen  of  my  acquaintance  who  knew  the  social 
worker  and  said  they  believed  him,  to  give  what  aid 
they  could.  Together  they  worked  for  weeks.  They 
made  an  exhaustive  investigation,  and  their  conclu- 
sion, in  which  the  clergymen  joined,  was  that  there 
was  not  the  slightest  ground  for  the  silly  tale. 

It  was,  of  course,  simply  another  variant  of  the 
story  that  had  gone  the  rounds  of  the  two  con- 
tinents, a  story  which  had  been  somehow  psycho- 
logically timed  to  meet  the  hysteria  which  the  pulpit, 
the  press,  and  the  legislatures  had  displayed,  as  had 
the  people,  in  one  of  those  strange  moral  movements 
which  now  and  then  seize  upon  the  public  mind,  and, 
in  effect,  make  the  whole  population  into  a  mob, 

277 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

which  is,  of  course,  the  most  moral  thing  in  the 
world.  The  subject  was  investigated  in  England 
and  it  was  shown  that  not  one  of  the  stories  told  in 
this  cause  there  had  any  foundation  in  fact.*  So 
far  as  I  know,  no  authentic  verification  of  the  story 
in  any  of  its  forms  has  ever  been  made.  And  yet  it 
was  the  stock  in  trade  of  the  professional  moralists 
and  was  employed  by  them  in  two  continents  to  gen- 
erate that  hysteria  without  which  they  cannot  carry 
on  their  reforms.  It  was  repeated  and  accepted — 
that  is  all,  and  to  doubt  it  was  to  make  oneself 
particeps  crvmims,  a  sort  of  accessory  after  the 
fact. 

XLIX 

It  is  a  subject  which  only  the  student  of  morbid 
psychology,  I  suppose,  can  illuminate  properly,  but 
I  fancy  he  would  find  somewhere  a  significance  in 
the  phrase  "white  slave,"  when  acted  upon  by  minds 
that  had  never  been  refined  enough  to  imagine  any 
but  the  grossest  of  objective  crimes,  and  out  of  all 
this  there  arose  a  new  conception  of  the  prostitute 
quite  as  grotesque  as  that  which  it  replaced.  She 
was  no  longer  the  ruined  and  abandoned  thing  she 
once  was,  too  vile  for  any  contact  with  the  virtuous 
and  respectable;  she  no  longer  occupied  even  the 
sacrificial  pose  in  which  Cato  centuries  ago  and 
Lecky  in  our  own  time  figured  her ;  she  was  not  even 
that  daughter  of  joy  whose  dalliance  is  the  secret 

•"The  Truth  About  the  White  Slave  Traffic,"  by  Teressa 
Billington-Greig.     The  English  Review,  June,  1913. 

278 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

clespair  of  moralists  too  prudent  to  imitate  her 
abandon;  she  became  the  white  slave,  a  shanghaied 
innocent  kept  under  lock  and  key.  And  thousands 
and  thousands  of  her  sisters  were  said  to  be  trapped 
every  year  in  precisely  the  same  way  by  the  minions 
of  a  huge  system,  organized  like  any  modern  com- 
bination of  rapacity  and  evil,  with  luxurious  head- 
quarters, presumably  in  some  skyscraper  in  New 
York,  and  its  own  attorneys,  agents,  kidnappers, 
crimpers,  seducers,  panderers  and  procuresses  all 
over  the  land,  a  vast  and  complicated  organization, 
with  baffling  ramifications  in  all  the  high  and  low 
places  of  the  earth.  The  sensational  newspapers  re- 
ferred to  it  as  "the  white  slave  syndicate,"  as  though 
it  were  as  authentic  as  the  steel  trust  or  Standard 
Oil.  It  was  even  said  that  somewhere  in  New  York 
the  trust  conducted  a  daily  auction!  With  such  a 
bizarre  notion,  the  victims  of  their  own  psychic  las- 
civiousness  became  obsessed.  Raids  and  "revivals" 
must  be  inaugurated,  a  body  of  new  laws  enacted, 
and  a  horde  of  official  inspectors,  agents  and  detec- 
tives turned  loose  on  the  land,  empowered  to  arrest 
any  man  and  woman  traveling  together,  and  hold  the 
man  guilty  of  a  felony. 

To  be  sure,  it  was  something  to  have  the  concep- 
tion change.  It  was  something  that  the  prostitute 
should  at  last  be  regarded  with  some  touch  of  human 
pity.  And  it  was  something,  a  great  deal,  indeed, 
that  there  was,  with  all  the  fanatical  and  zealous 
law  making,  some  quiet  study  of  the  problem.  The 
word  "economic,"  so  long  scorned  by  the  proponents 
of  an  absolute  morality,   somehow  penetrated  the 

279 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

public  consciousness,  and  at  last  it  dawned  on  the 
human  mind  that  prostitution  is  related  to  economic 
pressure.  But,  unfortunately,  by  the  familiar 
human  process,  the  mind  leaped  to  extremes ;  it  was 
assumed  that  all  prostitutes  were  girls  who  did  not 
receive  sufficient  wages,  and  the  simple  and  all  suf- 
ficient cure  was  to  be  the  minimum  wage;  instead  of 
receiving  eight  dollars  a  week  and  going  to  the  bad, 
all  working  girls  were  to  be  paid  nine  dollars  a  week 
and  remain  virtuous.  And  of  course  new  work  for 
the  constable  was  cut  out;  if  the  employers  of  girls 
did  not  pay  them  that  much,  they  were  all  to  go  to 
jail,  and  if  the  girls  did  not  remain  chaste  after  they 
had  been  assured  of  that  splendid  income,  they 
must  go  to  the  pillory  for  the  godly  to  spit  at. 
This,  with  the  laws  against  white  slavery,  was  to  be 
the  panacea,  and  prostitution,  a  problem  which  had 
perplexed  the  thoughtful  for  thirty  centuries,  was 
to  be  solved  before  the  autumn  primaries,  so  that 
those  who  solved  it  might  get  their  political  rewards 
promptly. 

I  used  to  wish,  when  it  was  presented  to  me  as 
mayor,  that  some  of  these  cock-sure  persons  who 
would  solve  the  problem  off-hand  by  issuing  a  gen- 
eral order  to  the  police,  could  get  themselves  elected 
to  the  opportunity.  Of  course  I  issued  no  general 
order  on  the  subject;  perhaps  I  was  too  skeptical, 
too  much  lacking  in  faith  in  the  miraculous  powers 
of  the  constabulary.  Our  city  was  like  all  cities; 
there  were  prostitutes  in  brothels,  prostitutes  in 
saloons,  prostitutes  in  flats,  prostitutes  on  the 
streets  at  night.     There  were,  for  instance,  a  score 

280 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

or  more  of  disorderly  saloons  where  men  and  women 
congregated.  But  we  found  that  merely  by  posting 
a  policeman  in  uniform  before  such  a  place,  its 
patronage  was  discouraged,  and  in  a  few  days  dis- 
continued. Of  course  it  was  a  dangerous  and  pre- 
posterous power  to  wield ;  in  the  hands  of  unscrupu- 
lous police  it  might  have  appalling  possibilities  of 
evil.  I  had  the  idea  of  stationing  a  policeman  before 
a  disorderly  house  from  Tom  Johnson,  who  told  me 
he  had  it  from  his  father — who  was  Chief  of  Police 
in  Louisville.  And  so  we  adopted  it,  and  after  a 
while  the  wine-rooms  were  no  more.  And  that  was 
something.  But  the  girls  in  them,  of  course,  had  to 
go  somewhere,  just  as  Jones  said. 

Then  we  found  that  the  police,  if  they  were  brutal 
enough,  could  drive  the  girls  off  the  streets.  It 
seemed  to  me  always  a  despicable  sort  of  business — 
the  actions  of  the  police  I  mean;  I  didn't  like  to 
hear  the  reports  of  it;  I  don't  like  to  think  of  it, 
or  write  of  it  even  now.  It  is  not  very  creditable 
to  make  war  on  women,  whatever  the  Puritans  may 
say.  But  the  streets  would  show  an  improvement, 
even  they  would  admit;  much  as  they  might  linger 
and  loiter  and  leer,  the  most  seductively  pure  of 
them  could  not  get  himself  "accosted"  anywhere 
down  town  at  night.  Of  course,  after  a  while,  the 
poor  things  would  come  back,  or  others  exactly  like 
them  would  come.  Then  the  police  would  have  to 
practice  their  brutalities  all  over  again.  Perhaps 
they  were  not  brutal  enough ;  I  am  not  certain.  To 
be  sure  they  were  not  as  brutal  as  Augustus  with  his 
sumptuary  laws,  or  as  Theodosius,  or  Valentinian, 

281 


FORTY   YEARS    OF   IT 

or  Justinian,  or  Karl  the  Great,  or  Peter  the  Great, 
or  St.  Louis,  or  Frederick  Barbarossa,  or  the  Em- 
press Maria  Theresa  in  Vienna,  or  as  John  Calvin 
in  Geneva,  or  Cotton  Mather  in  Massachusetts,  with 
all  their  tortures  and  floggings  and  rackings  and 
brandings  and  burnings ;  or  as  the  English  Puritans 
who  used  to  have  bawds  whipped,  pilloried,  branded 
and  imprisoned  and  for  a  second  offense  put  to 
death.  And  even  they  were  not  brutal  enough,  it 
seems,  since  prostitution  went  right  on  down  the 
centuries  to  our  times.  I  suppose  that  we  might 
have  learned  from  their  failures  that  prostitution 
could  not  be  ended  by  physical  force  and  brutality. 
However,  when  the  girls  were  driven  from  the  streets, 
inasmuch  as  the  police  did  not  despatch  them,  they 
still  had  to  go  somewhere,  and  the  brothels  remained. 
They  had  their  own  quarter  and  if  it  was  not  a  segre- 
gated quarter  it  was  something  very  like  it,  since  the 
police  bent  their  efforts  to  rid  other  portions  of  the 
city  of  such  places.  It  was  perhaps  a  tolerated 
rather  than  a  segregated  district,  and  after  a  while 
the  Director  of  Public  Safety  wished  to  try  the  ex- 
periment of  making  it  a  regulated  district  as  well. 
I  felt  that  the  world  was  too  old  and  I  found  myself 
too  much  of  its  mood  to  hope  that  any  good  could 
come  from  any  of  the  efforts  of  policemen  to  dispose 
of  such  a  problem,  but  I  was  glad  of  any  experi- 
ment conducted  in  sincerity  that  might  make  for 
the  better,  and  accordingly  the  Director  of  Safety 
put  his  scheme  into  operation.  It  was  not  reglemen- 
tation  in  the  exact  European  sense,  since  the  temper 
of  our  American  people  will  not  acquiesce  in  that, 

282 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

anid,  as  I  discovered  by  some  inquiries  of  my  own  in 
the  principal  cities  of  Europe,  it  is  not  of  very  valid 
effect  over  there.  But  the  Director  adopted  most 
of  the  familiar  requirements  of  the  Parisian  regie- 
merit,  except  the  examinations,  and  the  registra- 
tion of  those  not  en  maison;  he  required  the 
proprietresses  to  report  at  police  headquarters  the 
presence  of  new  inmates ;  he  forbade  them  to  have 
minors  or  male  parasites  in  the  houses,  and  as  far 
as  possible  he  separated  the  business  from  the  saloon 
business.  Any  house  which  ignored  his  orders  found 
a  policeman  posted  before  it;  then  it  came  to  time. 
The  result  was,  as  Mr.  Mooney  could  report  in  the 
course  of  a  year,  that  the  number  of  brothels  had 
been  reduced  from  over  two  hundred  to  thirty  and 
the  number  of  prostitutes  of  whom  the  police  had 
any  knowledge,  in  an  equal  proportion.  He  was 
very  proud  when  General  Bingham  complimented  his 
policemen  and  their  policing,  as  he  was  at  similar 
compliments  from  the  government's  white  slave 
agents. 

Superficially  this  was  a  very  gratifying  report, 
but  only  superficially.  Five-sixths  of  the  brothels 
had  been  closed,  but  their  inmates  had  to  go  some- 
where, just  as  Jones  said,  and  the  police  found  that 
clandestine  prostitution  had  proportionately  in- 
creased ;  the  women  had  gone  into  flats,  or  hotels,  or 
residences  which  on  occasion  could  be  made  to  serve 
as  assignation  houses.  It  may  perhaps  have  im- 
proved the  life  of  the  prostitute,  made  it  freer  and 
more  human,  or  perhaps  it  indicated  that  prosti- 
tution in  America  is  showing  a  decadent  tendency 

283 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

toward  refinement.  But  while  they  had  reduced  the 
number  of  houses  of  prostitution,  the  police  discov- 
ered that  they  had  not  reduced  prostitution  in  the 
least,  and  when,  after  a  trial  of  four  years,  I  asked 
the  Director  and  the  Chief  of  Police  what  the  re- 
sult of  the  experiment  had  been,  they  said  that,  aside 
from  the  fact  that  it  seemed  to  make  for  order  in 
the  city,  and  simplified  the  work  of  policing,  it  had 
done  no  good. 

The  experience  was  like  that  of  Chicago,  where 
after  a  police  order  prohibiting  the  sale  of  liquor  in 
houses  of  prostitution,  it  was  found — according  to 
the  report  of  the  vice  commission — to  be  "un- 
doubtedly true  that  the  result  of  the  order  has  been 
to  scatter  the  prostitutes  over  a  wide  territory  and 
to  transfer  the  sale  of  liquor  carried  on  heretofore 
in  houses  to  the  near-by  saloon  keepers,  and  to 
flats  and  residential  sections,  but  it  is  an  open 
question  whether  it  has  resulted  in  the  lessening 
of  either  of  the  two  evils  of  prostitution  and 
drink." 

The  experience,  I  think,  is  probably  universal.  I 
used  to  hear  the  systems  of  regulation  used  in  Euro- 
pean cities  held  up  as  models  by  the  pessimistic  as 
the  only  practical  method  of  dealing  with  the  prob- 
lem. Paris  was  commonly  considered  as  the  ideal 
in  this  respect;  latterly  it  is  apt  to  be  Berlin.  But 
the  fact  is  that  the  reglementation  which  for  years 
and  years  has  been  in  force  in  Paris  is  a  failure ;  the 
experience  there  was  precisely  what  it  was  in  our 
little  city.  And  from  Berlin,  which  the  well  known 
German  genius  for  organization  has  made  the  most 

284 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

efficiently  governed  city  in  the  world,  the  same  fail- 
ure has  been  reported. 

In  England,  on  the  other  hand,  there  is  no  regula- 
tion; any  evening  along  Piccadilly,  one  may  see 
street  walkers  whom  the  police  never  dream  of  mo- 
lesting. It  is  in  part  due  to  the  traditional  Puritanic 
attitude  of  our  northern  race,  and  partly  to  the  re- 
spect for  personal  liberty  that  exists  in  England. 
There  the  principle  is  much  more  scrupulously  re- 
spected than  with  us,  with  whom  individual  liberty 
indeed,  is  hardly  a  principle  at  all.  With  us  the 
phrase  "personal  liberty"  is  regarded  merely  as  a 
shibboleth  of  brewers  and  distillers,  an  evidence  on 
the  part  of  him  who  employs  it  that  he  is  a  besotted 
slave  to  drink  and  an  unscrupulous  minion  of  the 
rum  power.  The  interferences  practiced  daily  by 
our  policemen  are  unknown  there,  and  if,  for  in- 
stance, it  should  even  be  proposed  that  an  enact- 
ment like  that  in  Oklahoma  limiting  the  amount  of 
liquor  a  man  may  keep  in  his  own  house,  and  pro- 
viding that  agents  of  the  state  may  enter  his  domi- 
cile at  will  and  make  a  search,  and  especially  if  in 
the  remotest  region  of  the  British  Isles  there  should 
be  an  instance  of  what  Walt  Whitman  calls  "the 
never  ending  audacity  of  elected  persons,"  such  as 
is  of  daily  occurrence  in  that  state  where  these 
agents  enter  railway  trains  and  slit  open  the  valises 
of  travelers  in  their  quest  of  the  stuff,  the  whole  of 
the  question  hour  the  next  afternoon  in  the  House 
of  Commons  would  be  occupied  with  indignant  inter- 
pellations of  the  home  secretary  and  the  Times  could 
not  contain  all  the  letters  that  would  be  written. 

285 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

Other  lands  have  made  other  experiments,  but 
everywhere  and  in  all  times  the  same  failure  has 
been  recorded,  from  the  efforts  of  Greece  to  control 
the  hetaerae  and  dicteriades  and  the  severe  regula- 
tions of  ancient  Rome,  down  to  the  latest  reform 
administration  in  an  American  city.  Nothing  that 
mankind  has  ever  tried  has  been  of  the  slightest 
avail.  And  now  come  the  vice  commissions  with 
their  pornographic  reports,  and  no  doubt  feeling 
that  they  have  to  propose  something  after  all  the 
trouble  they  have  gone  to,  when  they  have  set  forth 
in  tabulated  statistics  what  everybody  in  the  world 
already  knows,  they  repeat  the  old  ineptitudes. 
That  is,  more  law,  more  hounding  by  the  police. 

The  Chicago  product  is  the  classic  and  the 
model  for  all  of  these,  and  as  the  latest  and  loftiest 
triumph  of  the  Puritan  mind  in  the  realm  of  morals 
and  of  law,  a  triumph  for  which  three  centuries  of 
innocence  of  nothing  save  humor  alone  could  have 
prepared  it,  its  own  great  masterpiece  in  morals 
was  at  once  forbidden  circulation  in  the  mails  be- 
cause of  its  immorality! 

The  problem  cannot  be  solved  by  policemen, 
even  if — as  is  now  recommended — they  be  called 
"morals"  police.  The  word  has  a  reassuring  note 
of  course,  possibly  by  some  confused  with  "moral" 
police,  but  policemen  are  policemen  still.  I  have  seen 
the  police  des  moeurs  in  European  cities,  and  they 
look  quite  like  other  policemen.  And  all  cities 
in  America  have  had  morals  police;  that  is  exactly 
what  our  policemen  have  been,  and  that  is  exactly 
what  is  the  matter  with  them.    That  is,  all  cities  have 

286 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

had  detectives  especially  detailed  to  supervise  the 
conduct  of  the  vicious,  and  they  always  fail.  We 
had  such  a  squad  in  Toledo  for  years,  though  it 
was  not  called  morals  police.  It  was  composed  of 
men,  mere  men,  because  we  had  nothing  else  but 
men  to  detail  to  the  work.  They  were  honest,  de- 
cent, self-respecting  men  for  the  most  part,  who  on 
the  whole  did  very  well  considering  the  salaries  they 
were  paid  and  the  task  imposed  on  them.  They  reg- 
ulated vice  as  well  as  anybody  anywhere  could  regu- 
late it.  But  of  course  they  failed  to  solve  the  prob- 
lem, just  as  the  world  for  thousands  of  years  has 
failed  to  solve  it,  with  all  the  machinery  of  all  the 
laws  of  all  the  lawgivers  in  history.  Solon  in 
Athens  tried  every  known  device,  including  segre- 
gation. He  established  a  state  monopoly  of  houses 
of  prostitution,  confined  the  dicteriades  to  a  certain 
quarter  of  the  city,  and  compelled  them  to  wear  a 
distinctive  dress,  but  all  his  stringent  laws  had 
broken  down  long  before  Hyperides  dramatically 
bared  the  breast  of  Phryne  to  the  Areopagus.  In 
Rome  there  was  the  most  severe  regulation  in 
the  ancient  world  and  yet — it  may  be  read  in  Gibbon 
— the  successive  experiments  of  the  law  under 
Augustus,  Tiberius,  Caligula,  Valerian,  Theodosius 
and  Justinian  were  all  failures,  and  when  the  laws 
were  most  rigorous  and  the  most  rigorously  en- 
forced, immorality  was  at  its  height.  Charlemagne 
tried  and  failed,  and  though  the  sentiment  of  the 
age  of  chivalry  and  the  rise  of  Christianity  for  a 
while  softened  the  law,  under  the  English  Puritans, 
bawds  were  whipped,  pilloried,  branded  and  impris- 

287 


FORTY   YEARS    OF   IT 

oned,  and  for  a  second  offense  put  to  death.  France 
was  not  behind;  under  Louis  IX.,  prostitutes  were 
exiled,  and  in  1635  an  edict  in  Paris  condemned  men 
concerned  in  the  traffic  to  the  galleys  for  life,  while 
the  women  and  girls  were  whipped,  shaved  and  ban- 
ished for  life.  Charles  V.  in  the  monastery  at  Yuste, 
trying  to  make  two  clocks  tick  in  union,  found  his 
efforts  no  more  vain  than  his  attempts  to  regulate 
human  conduct,  and  Philip  II.  tried  again  to  do 
what  his  father  had  been  unable  to  accomplish. 
Peter  the  Great  was  a  grim  enforcer  of  the  laws, 
and  in  Vienna  Maria  Theresa  was  most  rigorous 
with  prostitutes,  putting  them  in  a  certain  garb,  and 
then  in  handcuffs ;  she  was  almost  as  remorseless 
in  her  treatment  of  them  as  was  John  Calvin  in 
Geneva,  which  came  to  have  more  prostitutes  pro- 
portionately than  any  other  city  in  Europe.  Sev- 
eral modern  attempts  at  annihilation  have  been 
made.  Saxony  tried  to  do  away  with  prostitutes, 
but  they  exist  in  Dresden  and  other  cities  of  the 
Kingdom  and  Hamburg  claims  to  have  banished 
them,  but  in  that  Free  and  Hanseatic  city  I  was  told 
by  an  American  who  was  investigating  the  subject 
that  there  were  as  many  there  as  elsewhere. 


And  these  laws  have  not  only  failed,  they  have 
not  only  stimulated  and  intensified  the  evil,  but  they 
themselves  have  created  a  white  slavery  worse  than 
that  of  the  preposterous  tales  and  sentimental  twad- 

288 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

die  that  circulate  among  the  neurotic,  a  white  slav- 
ery worse  than  any  ever  imagined  by  the  most  ro- 
manticistic  of  the  dime  novelists  or  by  the  most  su- 
perheated of  the  professional  reformers.  Every  one 
of  these  laws  has  been  devised,  written  and  enacted 
in  the  identical  spirit  with  which  the  Puritans  in 
Massachusetts  branded  the  red  letter  on  the  scarlet 
woman.  Every  one  of  them  is  an  element  of  that 
brutal  and  amazing  conspiracy  by  which  society 
makes  of  the  girl  who  once  "goes  wrong,"  to  use 
the  lightest  of  our  animadversions,  a  pariah  more 
abhorred  and  shunned  than  if  she  were  a  rotting 
leper  on  the  cliffs  of  Molokai.  She  may  be  human, 
alive,  with  the  same  feelings  that  all  the  other  girls 
in  the  world  have ;  she  may  have  within  her  the  same 
possibilities,  life  may  mean  exactly  the  same  thing 
to  her,  she  may  have  youth  with  all  its  vague  and 
beautiful  longings,  but  society  thunders  at  her  such 
final  and  awful  words  as  "lost,"  "abandoned," 
thrusts  her  beyond  its  pale,  and  causes  her  to  feel 
that  thereafter  forever  and  forever,  there  is  literally 
no  chance  of  redemption  for  her;  home,  society, 
companionship,  hope  itself,  all  shut  their  obdurate 
doors  in  her  face.  In  all  the  world  there  are  just 
two  places  she  may  go,  the  brothel,  or  the  river, 
and  even  if  she  choose  the  latter,  that  choice,  too,  is 
a  sin.  She  is  "lost"  and  the  awful  and  appalling 
lie  is  thundered  in  her  astonished  ears  by  the  united 
voices  of  a  prurient  and  hypocritical  society  with 
such  indomitable  force  and  persistence  that  she 
must  believe  it  herself,  and  acquiesce  in  its  dread 
finality.     And  there  is  no  course  open  to  her  but 

289 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

to  go  on  in  sin  to  the  end  of  days  whose  only  mercy 
is  that  they  are  apt  to  be  brief.  No  off-hand  moral- 
ist, even  by  exercising  his  imagination  to  the  last 
degree  of  cruelty,  has  ever  been  able  to  devise  such 
a  prison  as  that.  White  slave,  indeed,  shackled  by 
the  heaviest  chains  the  Puritan  conscience  has  yet 
been  able  to  forge  for  others ! 

Strange,  too,  since  the  attitude  is  assumed  by  a 
civilization  which  calls  itself  Christian  and  preaches 
that  the  old  law,  with  its  eye  for  an  eye  and  its 
tooth  for  a  tooth,  was  done  away  with  and  lost  in  a 
new  and  beautiful  dispensation.  "Neither  do  I  con- 
demn thee;  go,  and  sin  no  more."  If  the  world  is 
ever  to  solve  this  problem,  it  must  first  of  all  appre- 
hend the  spirit  of  this  simple  and  gracious  expres- 
sion, do  away  with  its  old  laws,  its  old  cruelties,  its 
old  brutalities,  its  old  stupidities,  and  approach  the 
problem  in  that  human  spirit  which  I  suspect  is  so 
very  near  the  divine.  Once  in  this  attitude,  this 
spirit,  society  will  be  in  position  to  learn  something 
from  history  and  from  human  experience,  something 
from  life  itself,  and  what  it  will  learn  first  is  that 
Puritanical  laws,  the  hounding  of  the  police,  and 
all  that  sort  of  thing  have  never  lessened  prostitu- 
tion in  the  world,  but  on  the  contrary  have  increased 
it. 

What!  Let  them  go  and  not  do  anything  to 
them?  Well,  yes,  if  we  can't  think  of  anything 
better  to  do  to  them  than  to  hurt  them  a  little 
more,  push  them  a  little  farther  along  the  road  to 
that  abyss  toward  which  we  have  been  hustling 
them.     Why  is  it  constantly  necessary  to  do  some- 

290 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

thing  to  people?  If  we  can't  do  anything  for  them, 
when  are  we  going  to  learn  to  let  them  alone?  Or 
must  this  incessant  interference,  this  meddling,  this 
mauling  and  manhandling,  go  on  in  the  world  for- 
ever and  ever? 

As  to  what  is  to  be  done  about  it,  since  all  that 
ever  has  been  attempted  has  been  so  much  worse  in 
its  effect  than  if  we  had  never  done  anything,  I 
suppose  I  need  not  feel  so  very  much  ashamed  of 
confessing  my  ignorance  and  saying  that  I  do  not 
know.  If  it  were  left  to  me  I  think  the  first  thing 
I  should  do  is  to  repeal  all  the  criminal  laws 
on  the  subject,  beginning  with  that  most  savage 
enactment  the  Puritan  conscience  ever  devised, 
namely,  the  law  declaring  certain  children  "illegiti- 
mate," a  piece  of  stupid  brutality  and  cruelty  that 
would  make  a  gorilla  blush  with  shame  if  it  were 
even  suggested  in  the  African  jungle. 

Yes,  the  first  thing  to  do  is  to  repeal  all  the  crim- 
inal laws  on  the  subject.  They  do  no  good,  and  even 
when  it  is  attempted  to  enforce  them,  the  result  is 
worse  than  futile.  I  myself,  with  my  own  eyes,  in 
the  old  police  court  where  I  have  witnessed  so  many 
squalid  tragedies,  have  seen  a  magistrate  fine  a 
street  walker  and  then  suspend  the  fine  so  that,  as 
he  explained  to  her  in  all  judicial  seriousness,  she 
might  go  out  and  "earn"  enough  money  to  come 
back  and  pay  it!  And  not  a  person  in  the  court 
room,  so  habituated  and  conventionalized  are  we 
all,  ever  cracked  a  smile  or  apparently  saw  anything 
out  of  the  way — least  of  all  the  street  walker! 

But  it  would  not  be  enough  simply  to  repeal  these 
291 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

laws  from  the  statute  books  of  the  state;  it  will  be 
necessary  to  accomplish  the  immensely  more  difficult 
task  of  repealing  them  from  the  human  heart,  where 
they  were  written  long  ago  in  anger,  and  hatred, 
and  jealousy  and  cruelty  and  fear,  that  is  in  the 
heat  of  all  the  baser  passions.  What  I  am  trying 
to  say  is  that  the  first  step  in  any  reasonable  and 
effective  reform  is  an  entire  change  of  attitude  on 
the  subject,  and  about  the  only  good  to  be  ex- 
pected from  the  agitation  about  white  slavery,  with 
all  its  preposterous  exaggeration  and  absurd  sen- 
sationalism is  that  it  is  perhaps  making  for  a 
changed  attitude,  a  new  conception;  if  it  will  ac- 
complish nothing  more  than  to  get  the  public  mind 
— if  there  is  a  public  mind,  and  not  a  mere  public 
passion — to  view  the  prostitute  as  a  human  being, 
very  much  like  all  the  other  human  beings  in  the 
world,  it  will  have  been  worth  all  it  has  cost  in  en- 
ergy and  emotion  and  credulity.  If  this  sort  of 
repeal  can  be  made  effective,  if  the  prostitute  can 
be  assured  of  some  chance  in  life  outside  the  dead 
line  which  society  so  long  ago  drew  for  her,  the  first 
step  will  have  been  taken. 

The  next  step  possibly  will  be  the  erection  of  a 
single  standard  of  morals.  And  this  cannot  be  done 
by  passing  a  law,  or  by  turning  in  an  alarm  for  the 
police.  That  means  thinking,  too,  and  education, 
and  evolution,  and  all  the  other  slow  and  toilsome 
processes  of  which  the  off-hand  reformers  are  so 
impatient.  This  single  standard  will  have  to  be 
raised  first  in  each  individual  heart;  after  that  it 
will  become  the  attitude  of  the  general  mind. 

292 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

And  then  the  commerce  in  vice  will  have  to  be 
stopped.  I  do  not  mean  prohibited  by  penal  laws 
alone.  Policemen  cannot  stop  it,  and  policemen 
should  have  no  more  to  do  with  it  than  firemen.  In 
fact  much  of  the  commerce  has  proceeded  from  the 
fact  that  its  regulation  has  been  entrusted  to  the 
police.  It  should  be  a  subject  for  the  fiscal  laws.  It 
is,  I  assume,  known  by  most  persons  that  the  owners 
of  the  dilapidated  tenements  in  which  for  the  most 
part  prostitution  is  carried  on,  because  of  the 
"risk,"  extort  exorbitant  rentals  for  them,  and  then 
on  the  ground  that  they  can  rent  them  to  no  one  of 
respectability,  they  hold  them  to  be  so  worthless 
that  they  pay  little  if  any  taxes  on  them.  Our 
present  tax  laws  of  course  have  the  effect  of  re- 
warding the  slothful,  the  lazy  and  the  idle,  and  of 
punishing  the  energetic  and  the  enterprising  pro- 
ducer in  business,  and  it  would  be  quite  possible  to 
revise  the  tax  laws  so  that  tenderloins  would  be 
economically  impossible,  because  they  would  cease 
to  be  profitable. 

In  the  next  place,  or  some  place  in  the  program, 
there  should  be  some  sort  of  competent  and  ju- 
dicious sex  education.  I  do  not  know  just  who 
would  impart  it,  since  no  one  as  yet  knows  very 
much  about  it,  but  with  the  earnest,  sincere  and 
devoted  work  that  is  being  carried  on  all  over  the 
world  by  the  scientific  men  and  women  who  are 
studying  eugenics  and  social  hygiene,  there  is  hope 
in  this  direction,  even  if  it  is  probable  that  the 
world  will  not  be  saved  by  the  new  race  of  athletes 
that  are  scientifically  to  be  bred,  and  may  still  have 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

some  use  in  its  affairs  for  the  minds  of  its  cripples 
who  in  all  times  have  contributed  so  much  to  its 
advancement. 

The  marvelous  phenomenon  known  as  the  fem- 
inist movement  which  the  students  and  historians  of 
the  next  two  hundred  years  will  be  busy  elucidating 
will  play  its  part,  too,  for  in  its  vast  impulse  toward 
the  equality  of  the  sexes  it  must  not  only  bring  the 
single  standard  of  morals,  but  it  should  somehow  be 
the  means  of  achieving  for  women  their  economic 
independence.  This  perhaps  would  be  the  most  im- 
portant of  all  the  steps  to  be  taken  in  the  solution 
of  the  problem.  The  economic  environment  of  course 
is  in  the  lives  of  many  girls  a  determining  factor 
and  in  this  connection  the  minimum  wage  indeed 
has  its  bearing.  The  old  Puritan  laws  were  con- 
ceived in  minds  intensely  preoccupied  with  the  duty 
of  punishing  people  for  their  sins.  Prostitutes  were 
prostitutes  because  they  were  "bad,"  and  when 
people  were  bad  they  must  be  punished.  But  now 
we  see,  or  begin  to  see,  if  vaguely,  that,  except  in 
metaphysics,  there  is  no  such  thing  in  our  complex 
human  life  as  an  absolute  good  or  an  absolute  bad; 
we  begin  to  discern  dimly  the  causes  of  some  of  the 
conduct  called  bad,  and  to  the  problem  of  evil  we 
begin  to  apply  the  conception  of  economic  influ- 
ences, social  influences,  pathological  influences,  and 
other  influences  most  of  us  know  little  or  nothing 
about. 

Thus  we  begin  to  see  that  a  girl's  wages,  for  in- 
stance, may  have  something  to  do  with  what  we  call 
her  morals;  not  everything,  but  something.     The 

£94 


FORTY   YEARS   OF   IT 

wages  of  a  girl's  father  have  something  to  do  with 
them,  too,  and  the  wages  of  her  great  grandfather 
for  the  matter  of  that.  So  the  dividends  on  which 
live  the  delicate  and  charming  ladies  she  beholds 
alighting  from  their  motor  cars  every  morning  in 
the  shopping  district  may  have  something  to  do  with 
them,  though  she  is  as  unconscious  and  as  innocent 
of  the  relation  as  they,  as  ignorant  as  all  of  us  are. 
Rents  have  something  to  do  with  them,  and  so  do 
taxes. 

But  after  the  whole  economic  system  has  been  re- 
adjusted and  perfected  and  equalized,  after  we  have 
the  minimum  wage,  and  the  single  tax,  and  industrial 
democracy,  and  every  man  gets  what  he  produces, 
and  economic  pressure  has  been  as  scientifically  ad- 
justed as  the  atmospheres  in  a  submarine  torpedo 
boat,  there  is  always  the  great  law  of  the  con- 
trariety of  things  to  be  reckoned  with,  according 
to  which  the  more  carefully  planned  the  event,  the 
less  it  resembles  the  original  conception.  The  hu- 
man vision  is  so  weak,  and  the  great  circle  of  life 
so  prodigious !  The  solution  will  come,  if  it  ever 
comes  at  all,  by  slow,  patient,  laborious,  drudging 
study,  far  from  the  midnight  session  of  the  legis- 
lature, far  from  the  ear  and  the  pencil  of  the  eager 
reporter,  far  from  the  platform  of  the  sweating  re- 
vivalist, far  from  the  head  office  of  the  police.  Our 
fondly  perused  pornography  might  expose  the  whole 
of  the  underworld  to  the  light  of  day,  the  general 
assembly  might  enact  successive  revisions  of  the  re- 
vised statutes  for  a  hundred  years,  we  might  develop 
the  most  superb  police  organization  in  all  history, 

295 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

achieving  the  apotheosis  of  the  Puritan  ideal  with  a 
dictagraph  in  every  bedroom  and  closet  in  the  town, 
and  it  all  would  be  of  no  avail.  The  study  must 
survey  the  whole  field  of  social  and  domestic  rela- 
tions, until  the  vast  mystery  of  life  is  understood, 
and  the  relation  between  its  wide  antitheses  estab- 
lished as  Tolstoy  presents  them  in  his  story  of 
the  poor  mother  who  took  her  daughter  to  the  public 
house  in  the  village,  and  the  rich  mother  who,  at 
the  same  time,  took  her  daughter  to  the  court  at 
St.  Petersburg.  It  will  be  found  perhaps  in  the 
long  run,  for  which  so  few  are  ever  willing  to  re- 
main, that  the  eradicable  causes  of  prostitution  are 
due  to  involuntary  poverty,  and  the  awful  task  is 
to  get  involuntary  poverty  out  of  the  world.  It 
is  a  task  which  has  all  the  tremendous  difficulties  of 
constructive  social  labor  and  it  is  as  deliberate  as 
evolution  itself.  And  even  if  it  is  ever  accomplished, 
there  will  remain  a  residuum  in  the  problem  inhering 
in  the  mysteries  of  sex,  concerning  which  even  the 
wisest  and  most  devoted  of  our  scientists  will  con- 
fess they  know  very  little  as  yet  and  have  not  much 
to  tell  us  that  will  do  us  any  good. 


LI 


In  taking  the  present  occasion  to  say  so  much 
about  the  work  in  morals  which  a  mayor  is  expected 
to  perform,  I  have  a  disquieting  sense  that  I  have 
fallen  into  a  tone  too  querulous  for  the  subject,  and 
perhaps  taken  a  mean  advantage  of  the  reader  in 

296 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

telling  of  my  troubles.  It  is  rather  a  troubled  life 
that  a  mayor  leads  in  one  of  these  turbulent  Ameri- 
can cities,  since  so  much  of  his  time  is  taken  up  by 
reformers  who  seem  to  expect  him  somehow  to  do 
their  holy  work  for  them,  and  yet  that  is  doubtless 
the  business  of  reformers  in  this  world,  and  since 
it  is  their  mission  to  trouble  some  one,  perhaps  it 
is  the  business  of  a  mayor  to  be  troubled  by  them 
in  his  vicarious  and  representative  capacity.  I 
should  not  deny  reformers  their  rights  in  this  re- 
spect, or  their  uses  in  this  world,  and  I  should  be 
the  last  to  question  their  virtues.  John  Brown  was 
beyond  doubt  a  strong  character  and  an  estimable 
man,  who  did  a  great  and  heroic  work  in  the  world, 
even  if  he  did  do  it  in  opposition  to  the  law,  and 
by  the  law  was  killed  at  last  for  doing  it,  but  by  all 
accounts  he  must  have  been  a  terrible  person  to  live 
with,  and  I  have  often  been  glad  that  I  was  not 
mayor  of  Ossawattomie  when  he  was  living  and  re- 
forming there.  I  would  as  soon  have  had  Peter  the 
Hermit  for  a  constituent. 

I  shall  not  go  quite  so  far  as  to  admit  that  our 
reformers  were  as  strong  in  character  as  either  of 
these  great  models  I  have  mentioned,  but  they  were 
as  persistent,  or  in  combination  they  were  as  per- 
sistent ;  when  one  tired  or  desisted,  another  promptly 
took  his  place;  there  were  so  many  that  they  could 
spell  each  other,  and  work  in  relays,  and  thus  keep 
the  torch  ever  alive  and  brandishing.  It  was  not 
only  the  social  evil  with  which  they  were  concerned, 
but  the  evil  of  drink,  and  the  evil  of  gambling,  and 
the  evil  of  theaters,  and  the  evil  of  moving  pictures, 

297 


FORTY   YEARS   OF   IT 

and  post  cards,  and  of  the  nude  in  art,  and  of  lin- 
gerie in  show  windows,  and  of  boys  swimming  in  the 
river,  and  playing  in  the  streets,  and  scores  of  other 
conditions  which  seemed  to  inspire  in  them  the  fear 
or  the  thought  of  evil. 

With  the  advent  of  spring,  the  mayor  must  put 
a  stop  to  lovers  wandering  in  the  parks ;  when  sum- 
mer comes  he  must  put  an  end  instantly  to  baseball ; 
in  the  winter  he  must  close  the  theaters  and  the 
dance  halls;  in  short,  as  I  said  before,  whenever  it 
was  reported  from  any  quarter  that  there  were  peo- 
ple having  fun,  the  police  must  instantly  be  de- 
spatched to  put  a  stop  to  it. 

And  strangely  enough,  even  when  we  did  succeed 
in  doing  away  with  some  of  the  evils  of  the  town, 
when  we  closed  the  saloons  promptly  at  midnight, 
the  hour  fixed  by  ordinance,  when  we  did  away  with 
many  evil  resorts,  when  wine  rooms  were  extirpated, 
and  the  number  of  maisons  de  tolerance  were  re- 
duced by  eighty-five  per  cent,  when  gambling  was 
stamped  out,  their  complaints  did  not  subside,  but 
went  on,  unabated,  the  same  as  before.  They  could 
not  be  satisfied  because  the  whole  of  their  impossi- 
ble program  was  not  adopted,  and  more  because 
there  was  no  public  recognition  of  their  infallibility 
and  no  admission  of  their  righteousness.  What  that 
type  of  mind  desires  is  not,  after  all,  any  reason- 
able treatment  of  those  conditions,  or  any  honest 
and  sincere  endeavor  to  deal  with  them.  It  demands 
intellectual  surrender,  the  acknowledgment  of  its  in- 
fallibility, and  a  protesting  hypocrite  can  more 
easily  meet  its  views  than  anyone  else. 

298 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

No  wonder  then  that  even  such  a  strong  man  as 
Tom  Johnson,  one  evening,  when  the  day  was  done, 
should  fling  himself  back  in  the  motor  car,  with  the 
dark  shadow  of  utter  weariness  and  despair  on  his 
face,  and  say: 

"I  wish  I  could  take  a  train  to  the  end  of  the  long- 
est railway  in  the  world,  then  go  as  far  as  wagons 
could  draw  me  and  then  walk  and  crawl  as  far  as  I 
could,  and  then  in  the  midst  of  the  farthest  forest 
lie  down  and  rest." 

We  all  have  such  moments,  of  course,  but  we 
should  have  fewer  of  them  if  we  had  a  national  trait 
of  which  I  have  read,  in  a  book  by  Mr.  Fielding  Hall 
in  relation  to  Burma.  He  says  the  Burmese  have 
a  vast  unwillingness  to  interfere  in  other  people's 
affairs. 

"A  foreigner  may  go  and  live  in  a  Burman  vil- 
lage," he  says,  "may  settle  down  there  and  live  his 
own  life  and  follow  his  own  customs  in  perfect  free- 
dom; may  dress  and  eat  and  drink  and  pray  and 
die  as  he  likes.  No  one  will  interfere.  No  one  will 
try  to  correct  him;  no  one  will  be  forever  insisting 
to  him  that  he  is  an  outcast,  either  from  civilization 
or  from  religion.  The  people  will  accept  him  for 
what  he  is  and  leave  the  matter  there.  If  he  likes 
to  change  his  ways  and  conform  to  Burmese  habits 
and  Buddhist  forms,  so  much  the  better ;  but  if  not, 
never  mind." 

What  a  hell  Burma  would  be  for  the  Puritan! 
And  what  a  heaven  for  everybody  else !  Perhaps  we 
would  all  better  go  live  there. 

These  things,  however,  should  be  no  part  of  a 
299 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

mayor's  business,  and  perhaps  I  may  justify  my 
speaking  of  them  by  saying  that  I  spoke  of  them 
principally  to  make  that  point  clear.  They  and 
some  other  problems  that  may  or  may  not  be  foreign 
to  his  duties,  have  the  effect  of  keeping  a  mayor 
from  his  real  work  which  is  or  should  be,  the  admin- 
istration of  the  communal  affairs  of  the  city,  and 
not  the  regulation  of  the  private  affairs  of  the  peo- 
ple in  it.  It  is  quite  impossible  to  imagine  any 
work  more  delightful  than  this  administration. 
Hampered  in  it  as  one  is  by  politicians,  who  regard 
every  question  from  the  viewpoint  of  the  parish 
pump,  it  is  nevertheless  inspiring  to  be  concerned 
about  great  works  of  construction  regarding  the 
public  comfort  and  convenience,  the  public  health 
and  the  public  amenities.  It  is  in  such  work  that 
one  may  catch  a  glimpse  of  the  vast  possibilities  of 
our  democracy,  of  which  our  cities  are  the  models 
and  the  hope. 

I  have  observed  in  Germany  that  the  mayors  of 
the  cities  there  are  not  burdened  by  these  extraneous 
issues,  and  I  think  that  that  is  the  reason  the  Ger- 
man cities  are  the  most  admirably  administered  in 
the  world.  Perhaps  I  should  say  governed,  too, 
though  that  is  hardly  correct,  since  the  governing 
there  is  done  by  the  state  through  its  own  officials. 
I  have  not  been  in  Germany  often  enough  or  re- 
mained long  enough  to  be  able  to  assert  that  gov- 
ernment, in  its  effect  for  good,  is  quite  as  much  a 
superstition  as  it  is  everywhere;  mere  political  gov- 
ernment, I  mean,  which  seems  to  be  so  implicitly 
for  the  selfish  benefit  of  those  who  do  the  governing. 

300 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

But  the  administration  of  public  affairs  is  so  en- 
tirely another  matter,  that  it  is  as  beautiful,  at 
least  in  its  possibilities  as  government  is  ugly  in 
its  actualities,  and  it  is  precisely  because  there  has 
been  so  much  insistence  on  government  in  our  cities 
that  there  is  as  yet  so  little  administration,  and 
that  so  inefficient. 

In  Germany  the  burgomeister  is  not  chosen  for 
his  political  views,  or  for  his  theories  of  any  sort,  or 
for  his  popularity;  he  is  chosen  because  of  his  abil- 
ity for  the  work  he  is  to  perform,  and  he  is  retained 
in  office  as  long  as  he  performs  that  work  properly. 
It  is  so  with  all  municipal  departments  and  the  re- 
sult is  order  and  efficient  administration.  When  a 
German  city  wants  a  mayor,  it  seeks  one  by  inquir- 
ing among  other  cities ;  sometimes  it  advertises  for 
him.  It  would  be  quite  impossible,  of  course,  for 
our  cities  to  advertise  for  mayors,  not  that  there 
would  be  any  lack  of  applicants,  since  everyone  is 
considered  capable  of  directing  the  affairs  of  a  city 
in  this  country.  Of  course  everyone  is  not  capable; 
few  of  the  persons  chosen  are  capable  at  the  time 
they  are  chosen.  Many  of  them  become  very  capable 
after  they  have  had  experience,  but  they  gain  this 
experience  at  the  expense  of  the  public,  and  about 
the  time  they  have  gained  it,  their  services  are  dis- 
pensed with,  and  a  new  incompetent  accidentally 
succeeds  them. 

The  condition  is  due  partly  to  the  fact  that  we 
are  of  a  tradition  that  is  concerned  with  governing 
exclusively,  and  not  administering;  our  conception 
is  of  an  executive,  a  kind  of  lieutenant  or  subaltern 

301 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

of  the  sovereign  power,  and  in  our  proverbial  fear 
and  jealousy  of  kings  we  see  that  he  does  not  have 
too  much  power  or  develop  those  powers  he  has  by  a 
long  tenure  of  office. 

The  officials  of  a  German  city  are  pure  adminis- 
trators, and  nothing  else;  they  are  not  governors 
or  censors.  They  are  not  charged  in  fact  with  po- 
lice powers  at  all.  And  if  they  were,  they  would 
not  have  questions  of  such  delicacy  to  meet,  for  the 
police  there  are  for  the  purpose  of  protecting  life 
and  property,  and  they  are  not  expected  to  regulate 
the  personal  conduct  and  refine  the  morals  of  the 
community,  or  to  rear  the  young.  They  have  not 
confused  their  functions  with  the  censores  mores  of 
old  Rome,  or  like  us,  with  the  beadles  of  New  Eng- 
land villages  of  colonial  times.  That  is,  the  Puritan 
spirit  is  not  known  there,  at  least  in  the  intensified 
acerbity  in  which  it  exists  with  us ;  moral  problems, 
oddly  enough,  are  left  to  parents,  teachers  or  pas- 
tors. The  police  over  there  are  generally  a  part  of 
the  military  organizations.  It  would  be  better  of 
course,  to  bear  the  ills  we  have  than  to  transplant 
any  military  system  to  our  soil,  for  state  police  in 
America  would  become  mere  Cossacks  employed  to 
keep  the  laboring  population  in  subjection.  But  if 
the  state  is  to  undertake  to  regulate  the  moral  con- 
duct of  the  inhabitants  of  cities,  it  should  provide  all 
the  means  of  regulation  and  take  all  the  responsibil- 
ity, including  the  onus  of  violating  the  democratic 
principle.  If  the  state  is  to  regenerate  the  land  by 
the  machinery  of  morals  police,  it  should  have  its 
own  morals  police,  tell  them  just  how  to  proceed  to 

302 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

compel  the  inhabitants  of  cities  to  be  moral,  and  pay 
them  out  of  the  state  treasury. 


LII 


It  is,  however,  a  curious  characteristic  of  our 
people,  or  of  the  vocal  minority  of  them,  that  while 
they  insist  on  every  possible  interference  with  every 
private  and  personal  right,  in  the  field  of  moral 
conduct,  they  nevertheless  will  tolerate  no  interfer- 
ence whatever  with  property  rights.  Thus  it  was 
precisely  as  Cossacks  that  many  employers  of  labor 
insisted  on  my  using  the  police  to  cow  their  work- 
men whenever  there  was  a  strike. 

During  my  first  term  it  befell  that  our  city  was 
torn  by  strikes,  all  the  union  machinists  in  town 
walked  out,  then  the  moulders,  and  at  last  a  great 
factory  wherein  automobiles  were  made  was 
"struck,"  as  the  workingmen  say.  It  is  impossible 
to  give  an  idea  of  the  worry  such  a  condition  causes 
officials.  It  is  more  than  that  sensation  of  weari- 
ness, of  irritation,  even  of  disgust,  which  it  causes 
the  general  public.  This  is  due  partly  to  the  re- 
sentment created  by  the  interference  with  phys- 
ical comfort,  and  even  peace  of  mind,  since  there 
is  in  us  all  something  more  than  a  fear  of  disorder 
and  tumult,  in  that  innate  love  of  harmony  which 
exists  potentially  in  humanity.  But  to  the  official 
there  is  a  greater  difficulty  because  of  the  respon- 
sibility to  which  he  is  held.  People  intuitively  re- 
gard strikers  as  public  enemies,  and  while  the  blame 

303 


FORTY   YEARS   OF   IT 

for  the  irritation  caused  by  strikes  is  visited  on  the 
direct  and  apparent  cause,  that  is,  the  strikers  them- 
selves; it  is  visited,  too,  on  the  official  head  of  the 
local  government,  who  is  supposed  to  be  able  some- 
how to  put  a  stop  to  such  things.  The  general  or 
mass  intelligence  will  not  as  yet  go  much  deeper 
than  the  superfices  of  the  problem,  or  seek  to  under- 
stand the  causes  of  economic  unrest  and  disorder; 
it  still  thinks  in  old  sequences  and  puts  its  trust  in 
the  weapons  of  the  flesh. 

I  think  I  shall  never  forget  the  first  call  I  had 
from  a  delegation  of  manufacturers  during  the  early 
days  of  those  strikes.  They  came  in  not  too  friendly 
spirit,  but  rather  in  their  capacity  of  "citizens 
and  tax-payers,"  standing  on  their  rights,  as  they 
understood  them,  though  they  in  common  with 
most  of  us  and  with  the  law  as  well,  had  only 
the  most  hazy  notions  as  to  what  those  rights 
were,  and  perhaps  still  hazier  notions  as  to  their 
duties.  "We  come,"  said  the  spokesman,  "rep- 
resenting two  millions  of  dollars'  worth  of  prop- 
erty." 

They  could  not  have  put  their  case  more  frankly. 
But  I,  as  I  was  able  to  recall  in  that  moment,  rep- 
resented two  hundred  thousand  people,  themselves 
among  them  of  course.  And  here  at  the  very  outset 
was  the  old  conflict  in  its  simplest  terms,  of  man 
against  property.  Now,  in  that  old  struggle,  while  I 
had  made  no  sacrifices  in  the  cause  and  have  been  of 
no  especial  service  in  it,  I  had  nevertheless  given  in- 
tellectual assent  to  the  general  propositions  ad- 
vanced in  favor  of  the  human  side,  the  side  of  man. 

304 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

By  prejudice,  or  perversity,  or  constitutionally,  I 
considered  men  of  more  value  than  factories.  I  had 
perhaps  never  heard  of  a  strike,  for  instance,  in 
which  my  sympathies  were  not  impulsively  with  the 
strikers.  I  could  always  see  that  poor  foreigner, 
whose  body  had  lain  there  on  the  cold  damp  rocks 
at  Lemont  so  many  years  before,  and  somehow  I 
could  not  get  out  of  my  mind's  eye  the  figures  of 
the  workmen  on  strike,  many  of  them  hungry  and 
desperate  as  their  wives  and  children  were;  they 
seemed  to  me  to  be  in  straits  more  dire  than  their 
harried  and  harassed  and  worried  employers,  though 
I  could  feel  sorry  for  them,  too,  since  even  if  they 
were  not  hungry,  they,  too,  were  the  victims  of  the 
anarchy  of  our  industrial  system.  They  had  of 
course  no  social  conscience  whatever,  but  perhaps 
they  could  not  help  that.  But  there  they  were, 
bringing  their  troubles  to  the  mayor,  whom  perhaps 
they  did  not  wholly  regard  as  their  mayor,  since 
they  had  some  prescience  of  the  fact  that  in  that 
mayor's  mind  was  always  the  memory  of  those 
throngs  of  workingmen  who  had  looked  up  to  him 
with  some  of  the  emotions  of  confidence  and  hope. 
There  was  alas  little  enough  that  he  could  do  for 
those  workingmen,  but,  especially  in  such  an  hour, 
he  must  at  least  not  forget  them.  Of  the  relative 
rights  of  their  present  quarrel  he  had  little  knowl- 
edge; but  he  had  envisaged  enough  of  life  to  know, 
without  too  much  sentimentalizing  them,  that,  while 
they  were  often  wrong,  they  were  somehow  right 
when  they  were  wrong.  That  is,  their  eternal  cause 
was  right. 

305 


FORTY   YEARS    OF   IT 

What  the  manufacturers  wanted,  as  they  put  it, 
was  "protection,"  a  term  with  vague  and  varying 
connotations.  As  was  the  case  in  all  the  strikes  of 
all  the  years  of  my  experience  in  the  mayoralty,  they 
felt  that  the  police  were  not  sufficiently  aggressive, 
or  that  the  Chief  of  Police  had  not  detailed  sufficient 
men  to  afford  them  protection.  I  did  not  raise  the 
question,  though  it  occurred  to  me,  as  to  what  the 
police  were  doing  to  protect  the  strikers,  who  were 
citizens,  too,  and  tax-payers,  or  at  least  rent-payers 
and  so  indirect  tax-payers,  but  when  I  asked  the 
Chief,  the  big-hearted  Perry  Knapp  reported  that 
the  strikers  were  complaining,  too,  and  out  of  his 
collection  of  works  on  Lincoln,  he  brought  me  one 
which  contained  a  letter  the  great  president  wrote 
to  General  John  M.  Schofield,  when  he  assigned  that 
officer  to  the  command  of  the  Department  of  the  Mis- 
souri, in  May,  1863,  to  succeed  General  Curtis. 
Curtis  had  been  the  head  of  one  party  as  Governor 
Gamble  had  been  the  head  of  the  other,  in  what 
Lincoln  called  the  pestilent  factional  quarrel  into 
which  the  Union  men  had  entered.  "Now  that  you 
are  in  the  position,"  wrote  Lincoln,  "I  wish  you  to 
undo  nothing  merely  because  General  Curtis  or  Gov- 
ernor Gamble  did  it,  but  to  exercise  your  own  judg- 
ment, and  do  right  for  the  public  interest.  Let  your 
military  measures  be  strong  enough  to  repel  the  in- 
vader and  keep  the  peace,  and  not  so  strong  as  to 
unnecessarily  harass  and  persecute  the  people.  It  is 
a  difficult  role,  and  so  much  the  greater  will  be  the 
honor  if  you  perform  it  well.  If  both  factions,  or 
neither,  shall  abuse  you,  you  will  probably  be  about 

306 


FORTY   YEARS    OF   IT 

right.    Beware  of  being  assailed  by  one  and  praised 
by  the  other." 

How  Lincoln  knew  human  nature!  It  seemed  as 
good  a  model  as  one  might  find,  since  we,  too,  were 
in  the  midst  of  a  little  civil  war,  and  we  always  tried 
to  pursue  that  course.  What  the  manufacturing 
employers  wished,  of  course,  was  for  us  to  use  the 
police  to  break  the  strike;  that  we  did  not  deem 
it  our  duty  to  do.  What  we  tried  to  do  was  to 
preserve  the  public  peace  and — since  our  industry 
in  its  present  status  is  war — to  let  them  fight  it 
out.  We  tried  to  see  to  it  that  they  fought  it  out 
along  the  lines  laid  down,  in  fixing  the  relative  rights 
of  the  industrial  belligerents,  by  the  Courts  of  Great 
Britain,  and  this  policy  had  the  virtual  approval  of 
our  own  courts  when  in  an  ancillary  way  it  came 
under  discussion  there.  But  we  had  difficulty  in 
maintaining  the  peace,  not  only  because  the  strik- 
ers, or  more  likely  their  sympathizers,  broke  it  now 
and  then,  but  because  when  the  strikers  were  not 
breaking  it,  the  employers  seemed  bent  on  doing 
something  to  make  them.  They  did  not  intend  it 
for  that  purpose  of  course;  they  simply  thought  in 
old  feudal  sequences.  They  hired  mercenaries,  bul- 
lies provided  as  "guards"  by  private  detective  agen- 
cies. It  kept  the  police  pretty  busy  disarming  these 
guards,  and  greatly  added  to  their  labors  because 
the  guards  were  always  on  the  point  of  hurting  some 
one. 


307 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 


LIII 

There  was  one  of  the  employers,  indeed,  who  grew 
so  alarmed  that  he  came  one  morning  to  the  office 
predicting  a  riot  at  his  plant,  that  very  afternoon  at 
five  o'clock,  when  the  works  were  to  shut  down  for 
the  day.  This  man  was  just  then  operating  his 
factory  with  strike  breakers  and  he  was  concerned 
for  their  safety.  Indeed  his  concern  was  expressed 
in  the  form  of  a  personal  sympathy  and  love  for 
them  which  was  far  more  sentimental  than  any  I 
had  ever  been  accused  of  showing  toward  working- 
men.  He  was  concerned  about  their  inalienable 
right  to  work,  and  about  their  wives  and  little  chil- 
dren, and  about  their  comfort  and  peace  of  mind; 
indeed  it  was  such  a  concern,  such  a  love,  that,  had 
he  but  shown  the  moiety  of  it  to  his  former  employ- 
ees, they  never  could  have  gone  out  on  strike  at  all. 

At  five  o'clock  that  day  then,  with  the  Chief  of 
Police,  I  visited  the  plant  to  observe,  and  if  possi- 
ble to  prevent  the  impending  riot.  The  works  had 
not  yet  closed  for  the  day,  but  in  the  street  before 
the  black  and  haggard  and  ugly  buildings  where 
they  had  toiled,  the  strikers  were  gathered,  and  with 
them  their  wives,  with  bare  and  brawny  forearms 
rolled  in  their  aprons,  and  their  children  clinging 
timorously  about  their  skirts.  It  was  a  gray  and 
somber  afternoon  in  spring,  but  there  was  in  the 
crowd  a  kind  of  nervous  excitement  that  might  have 
passed  for  gayety,  a  mood  that  strangely  travestied 
the  holiday  spirit;  perhaps  they  regarded  the  strike 

308 


FORTY   YEARS    OF   IT 

as  an  opportunity  for  the  sensation  lacking  in  their 
monotonous  lives.  There  were  several  hulking  fel- 
lows loafing  about  whom  the  Chief  of  Police  recog- 
nized as  private  detectives,  and  as  a  first  step  in 
preventing  disorder,  he  ordered  these  away.  Pres- 
ently the  whistle  blew  its  long,  lugubrious  blast, 
the  crowd  gathered  in  closer  groups,  and  a  silence 
fell.  Sitting  there  with  the  Chief  in  his  official 
buggy,  I  waited;  the  great  gates  of  the  high 
stockade  swung  slowly  open,  and  then  there  issued 
forth  a  vehicle,  the  like  of  which  I  had  never  seen 
before,  a  sort  of  huge  van,  made  of  rough  boards, 
that  might  have  moved  the  impedimenta  of  an  em- 
bassy. In  the  rear  there  was  a  door,  fastened  with 
a  padlock;  the  sides  were  pierced  with  loop  holes, 
and  on  the  high  seat  beside  the  driver  sat  an  enor- 
mous guard,  with  a  rifle  across  his  knees.  This  van, 
this  moving  arsenal  containing  within  its  mysterious 
interior  the  strike  breakers,  and  I  was  told  other 
guards  ready  to  thrust  rifles  through  those  loop 
holes,  moved  slowly  out  of  those  high  gates,  lurched 
across  the  gutter  into  the  street,  and  rumbled  away, 
and  as  it  went  it  was  followed  by  a  shout  of  such 
ridicule  that  even  the  guard  on  the  front  seat  lost 
his  menacing  gravity  and  smiled  himself,  perhaps 
with  some  dawning  recognition  of  the  absurdity  of 
the  whole  affair. 

There  was  no  riot,  though  when  the  employer  came 
to  see  me  the  next  day  I  could  assure  him  of  my 
surprise  that  there  had  been  none,  since  there  was 
an  invitation  to  disorder  almost  irresistible  in  that 
solemn  and  absurd  vehicle,  with  its  rifles  and  loop 

309 


FORTY   YEARS    OF   IT 

holes  and  guards  and  cowering  mystery  within.  And 
I  could  urge  upon  him  too  a  belated  recognition  of 
the  immutable  and  unwritten  law  by  which  such  an 
invitation  to  trouble  is  sure  to  be  accepted.  I  al- 
most felt,  I  told  him,  like  heaving  a  stone  after  it 
myself  to  see  what  would  happen.  He  finally  agreed 
with  me,  dismissed  his  guards,  and  dismantled  his 
rolling  arsenal,  and  not  long  afterward  was  using 
its  gear  to  haul  the  commodities  they  were  soon 
manufacturing  in  those  shops  again. 

And  the  strikes  in  the  other  plants  were  settled 
or  compromised,  or  wore  themselves  out,  or  in  some 
way  got  themselves  ended,  though  not  the  largest 
and  most  ominous  of  them,  that  in  the  automobile 
works,  until  my  friend  Mr.  Marshall  Sheppey  and  I 
had  worked  seventy-two  hours  continuously  to  get 
the  leaders  of  the  opposing  sides  together.  It  was  an 
illuminating  experience  for  both  of  us,  and  not  with- 
out its  penalties,  since  thereafter  we  were  called 
upon  to  arbitrate  a  dozen  other  strikes.  We  found 
both  sides  rather  alike  in  their  humanness,  and  one 
as  unreasonable  as  the  other,  but  we  found  too  that 
if  we  could  keep  them  together  long  enough,  their 
own  reason  somehow  prevailed  and  they  reached 
those  fragile  compromises  which  are  the  most  we 
may  expect  in  the  present  status  of  productive  in- 
dustry in  this  world. 

The  old  shop  of  Golden  Rule  Jones  had  its  strike 
with  the  rest  of  them,  and  yet  a  strange  and  sig- 
nificant fate  befell  it.  Alone  of  all  the  other  shops 
and  factories  in  the  city  involved  in  that  strike, 
it  was  not  picketed  by  the  strikers,  they  did  not 

310 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

even  visit  it,  so  far  as  I  know.  There  were  no  guards 
and  no  policemen  needed.  And  when  I  asked  one 
of  the  labor  leaders  to  account  for  this  strange 
oversight,  this  surprising  lack  of  solidarity  and  dis- 
cipline in  their  ranks,  he  said,  as  though  he  must 
exculpate  himself:  "Oh  well,  you  know — Mayor 
Jones.    We  haven't  forgotten  him  and  what  he  was." 


LIV 

It  was  because  of  this  attitude  toward  working- 
men,  and  their  cause,  that  I  was  accused,  now  and 
then,  by  those  who  knew  nothing  about  Socialism, 
of  being  a  Socialist;  by  those  who  did  know  about 
it  I  was  condemned  for  not  being  one.  Our  move- 
ment indeed  had  no  opponents  in  the  town  more  bit- 
ter than  the  Socialists,  that  is  the  authentic  and 
orthodox  Socialists  of  the  class-conscious  Marxist 
order,  and  they  opposed  me  so  insistently  that  I 
might  as  well  have  been  the  capitalist  class  and  had 
done  with  it.  I  do  not  intend  to  confuse  myself 
with  the  movement  of  which  I,  for  a  while,  was  but 
the  merest  and  weakest  of  human  instruments;  I 
speak  in  that  personal  sense  only  because  the  op- 
position was  of  a  personal  quality  so  intense  that 
it  could  hardly  have  been  expected  of  an  attitude 
that  was  always  insisted  upon  as  so  entirely  imper- 
sonal, the  cold  and  scientific  attitude  of  minds  that 
had  comprehended  the  whole  of  human  history,  an- 
alyzed the  whole  amazing  complexity  of  human  life, 
and  reduced  its  problems  to  that  degree  in  which 

311 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

they  were  all  to  be  solved  by  a  formula  so  brief  that 
it  could  be  printed  on  a  visiting  card.  The  com- 
plaint these  scientists  made  of  our  movement  was 
that  its  ameliorations  in  city  life  were  retarding 
that  evolution  of  which  they  were  the  inspired  cus- 
todians and  conservators;  some  of  them  spoke  of  it 
as  though  it  were  but  a  darkling  part  of  that  vast 
conspiracy  against  mankind  in  which  the  capitalists 
were  so  shamelessly  engaged.  If  we  had  only  let 
things  alone,  it  was  urged,  they  might  grow  so  des- 
perate that  no  one  but  the  Socialists  would  be  capa- 
ble of  dealing  with  the  appalling  situation. 

But  this  was  the  attitude  only  of  that  coterie 
which,  unselfishly,  no  doubt,  with  the  purest  of  mo- 
tives, and  only  until  the  industrial  democracy  could 
be  organized  and  rendered  sufficiently  class-conscious 
to  take  over  the  work,  was  directing  the  destinies  of 
the  Socialist  party,  very  much  to  the  fleshly  eye  in 
the  same  manner  that  the  Republican  machine  con- 
trolled that  party  or  the  Democratic  machine  its 
party,  or,  before  we  were  done,  certain  persons 
attempted  to  control  the  Independent  movement. 
So  far  as  I  could  discern,  there  was  not  much 
difference  in  them  all;  the  Socialists  seemed  to 
rely  on  all  the  old  weapons  that  had  so  long  been 
employed  in  the  world,  and  so  long  failed;  they 
seemed  to  contemplate  nothing  more  than  replace- 
ment of  old  orthodoxies  with  new,  old  tyrannies 
with  new  tyrannies ;  in  a  word,  to  preserve  the  old 
vicious  circle  in  which  humanity  has  been  revolving 
impotently  and  stupidly  down  all  the  grooves  of 
time. 

312 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

I  could  not  have  been  a  Socialist  because  life  had 
somehow  taught  me  that  this  is  a  world  of  relativi- 
ties, in  which  the  absolute  is  the  first  impossibility. 
I  could  share,  of  course,  their  hope,  or  the  hope  of 
some  of  them  in  a  well  ordered  society,  though  with 
many  of  them  the  dream  seemed  to  be  beautiful 
chiefly  because  they  expected  to  order  it  themselves; 
they  who  felt  themselves  so  long  to  have  been  the 
slaves  were  to  become  the  masters ;  their  hard  and  too 
logical  theory  of  classes  circumscribed  their  vision 
so  that  they  could  imagine  nothing  more  clearly, 
and  possibly  nothing  more  delightful  than  a  boule- 
versement  which  would  leave  them  on  top. 

I  could  recognize  with  them  the  masters  under 
whom  we  all  alike  were  serving  in  this  land,  and 
respect  them  as  little  as  we  might,  or  detest  them 
as  we  would,  they  presented  whatever  advantage 
there  is  in  familiarity ;  if  nothing  more  inviting  than 
a  change  in  masters  were  proposed,  one  would  prefer 
those  one  had  to  others  whose  habits  and  whims  he 
did  not  know.  One  could  be  pretty  sure  that  the 
new  masters  would  use  the  same  old  whips  and 
scorpions,  or  if  new  ones,  with  a  sting  more  bitter. 
They  proposed  as  much,  indeed,  in  their  rigid  form 
of  organization,  with  a  discipline  more  irksome  and 
relentless,  what  with  their  signing  of  pledges,  and 
their  visitations  and  committees  of  inspection,  and 
trials  for  heresy  and  excommunications.  They  re- 
minded me  of  those  prosecutors  who  could  behold 
no  defect  in  the  penal  machinery  save  that  it  had 
not  been  sufficiently  drastic;  they  would  replace  all 
old  intolerances  and  ancient  tyrannies  by  others  no 

313 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

different  save  that  they  were  employed  in  the  op- 
posing cause,  and  were  to  be  even  more  intolerant 
and  tyrannical. 

That  is,  the  Socialists  provided  for  everything  in 
the  world  except  liberty,  and  to  one  whose  dissolv- 
ing illusions  had  left  nothing  but  the  dream  of  lib- 
erty in  a  world  where  liberty  was  not  and  probably 
never  was  to  be,  there  was  no  allure  in  the  proposal 
to  take  away  even  the  dream  of  liberty. 

None  of  them  of  course  would  be  impressed  by 
these  objections — was  not  the  great  cure  for  so- 
cial ill  written  and  printed  on  a  card? — nor  would 
they  consider  them  even  until  they  had  been  sub- 
mitted to  the  prescribed  test  of  a  joint  debate,  about 
the  most  futile  device  ever  adopted  by  mankind,  and 
a  nuisance  as  offensive  as  any  that  ever  disturbed 
society.  It  was  of  course  the  only  amusement  they 
had,  as  popular  as  running  the  gauntlet  was  with 
the  Indians,  and  they  liked  to  torture  a  capitalist  to 
make  a  Socialist  holiday.  It  is  of  course  quite  use- 
less to  argue  with  one  who  is  always  right,  one  whose 
utterances  have  the  authority  of  revealed  truth,  but 
inasmuch  as  society  had  not  yet  been  developed  to  a 
point  of  communal  efficiency  sufficient  to  keep  the 
streets  clean,  it  seemed  idle  to  undertake  the  com- 
munal control  of  production  and  distribution.  And 
however  wrong  I  may  be  in  every  other  thing,  I  am 
quite  sure  that  I  am  right  in  this,  that  in  their  analy- 
sis of  society  they  have  failed  utterly  to  take  into 
account  that  classic  of  the  ironic  spirit,  the  great 
law  of  the  contrariety  of  things,  according  to  which 
the  expected  never  happens,  at  least  in  the  way  it 

314 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

was  expected  to  happen,  and  nothing  ever  turns 
out  the  way  it  was  planned. 

But  there  is  a  more  fundamental  law — that  of 
the  destructive  power  of  force,  which  always  defeats 
itself.  For  their  reliance  was  on  force — and  how 
quietly  they,  or  the  most  virile  of  them,  entered  upon 
their  last  phase  in  their  acceptance  of  the  doctrine 
of  force  as  preached  now  everywhere  by  the  I.  W.  W. 
agitator  on  the  curbstone!  Sometimes  after  all  the 
law  does  not  take  a  thousand  years  to  work  itself 
out. 

It  seemed  to  me  that  the  single  taxers  had  a 
scheme  far  better  than  that  of  the  Socialists,  since 
they  suggested  a  reliance  on  the  democratic,  and 
not  on  the  authoritarian  theory,  though  in  its  mys- 
terious progress,  in  its  constant  development  of  new 
functions,  democracy  may  be  expected  to  modify 
even  that  theory.  I  fear  at  least  that  it  would  not 
do  away  with  mosquitoes ;  possibly  not  even  with  re- 
formers. 


LV 


But  I  would  not  be  unfair,  and  I  counted  many 
friends  among  the  Socialists  of  my  town  and  time 
whose  best  ideals  one  could  gladly  share.  They  were 
immensely  intelligent,  or  immensely  informed;  they 
had  made  a  fairly  valid  indictment  against  society 
as  it  is  organized,  or  disorganized.  But  like  Mr. 
H.  G.  Wells,  who  calls  himself  a  Socialist,  these  ex- 
ceptions, in  Mr.  Wells's  words,  were  by  no  means 
fanatical  or  uncritical  adherents.     To  them  as  to 

315 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

him  Socialism  was  a  noble,  and  yet  a  very  human  and 
fallible  system  of  ideas.  To  them,  as,  again  to  him, 
it  was  an  intellectual  process,  a  project  for  the  re- 
shaping of  human  society  upon  new  and  better  lines 
— the  good  will  of  the  race  struggling  to  make 
things  better.  This  broad  and  tolerant  view  was 
the  one  to  which  they  held,  though  they  seemed  too 
closely  to  identify  all  the  good  will  in  the  race,  oper- 
ating, as  I  believe  it  to  be,  in  many  ways  and 
through  many  agencies,  as  Socialism,  and  the  pon- 
tifical Socialism  taught  in  our  town,  at  least,  was  so 
explicitly  a  class  hatred  that  most  of  the  time  it 
was  anything  in  the  world  rather  than  good  will. 
Anyone  with  a  good  heart  could  be  a  Socialist  on 
Mr.  Wells's  terms,  if  it  were  not  his  inevitable  fate 
to  be  assured  by  the  orthodox  custodians  of  the 
party  faith,  the  high  priests  who  alone  could  enter 
the  holy  of  holies  and  bear  forth,  as  occasion  re- 
quired, the  ark  of  the  covenant,  that  Mr.  Wells's 
Socialism  is  no  Socialism  at  all  and  that  he  is  no 
man  to  consult  or  accept. 

My  friends  among  them  were  like  him  in  the  con- 
demnation they  had  to  hear  from  the  machine,  or, 
perhaps  I  should  say,  the  governing  or  directing 
committee — whatever  the  euphemism  that  cloaks 
the  familiar  phenomenon  with  them — they  too  were 
said  to  be  no  Socialists  at  all;  they  were  mere  "in- 
tellectuals" or  "sentimentalists,"  or  easily  fell  into 
some  other  of  the  categories  the  Socialists  have  pro- 
vided for  every  manifestation  of  life.  They  have 
doubtless  rendered  society  a  service  by  their  minute 
classification;  which  seems  complete  if  they  would 

316 


FORTY   YEARS    OF   IT 

only  recognize  the  order  of  the  sectarian  mind,  and 
since  the  orthodox  among  them  afford  so  typical  an 
example,  include  themselves  in  it.  I  am  not  sure  that 
it  is  not  quite  as  distinct  a  species  as  the  capitalist 
class  itself,  at  least  it  causes  as  much  trouble  in 
the  world  as  the  Socialists  say  the  capitalist  class 
creates.  Socialists,  at  least  of  the  impossibilist  wing, 
evangelists,  prohibitionists,  Puritans,  policemen  and 
most  of  the  rest  of  the  reformers  are  endowed  with 
this  order  of  mind.  While  they  all  form  subdi- 
visions of  a  distinct  intellectual  class  of  humanity 
these  are  generally  the  same.  That  is,  they  are,  all 
of  them,  always  under  all  circumstances,  right.  All 
of  these  classes,  fundamentally,  follow  the  same  se- 
quences of  thought.  They  differ  of  course  in  minor 
details,  but  they  always  meet  on  that  narrow  strip 
of  ground  upon  which  they  have  erected  their  in- 
flexible model  for  humanity,  with  just  room  enough 
by  its  side  for  the  scaffold  upon  which  to  hang  those 
who  do  not  accept  it. 

Now,  when,  by  any  coincidence,  the  representatives 
of  any  two  of  these  species  meet  in  the  mistaken  sup- 
position that  there  is  any  disagreement  between 
them,  there  is  bound  to  be  trouble  of  course,  and 
whenever  say  a  Socialist  of  the  impossibilist  wing 
of  the  party,  and  a  policeman — and  all  good  po- 
licemen are  impossibilists — meet,  we  have  posited 
the  old  problem  in  physics  of  an  irresistible  body 
meeting  an  impenetrable  substance. 

This  phenomenon  occurred  on  two  or  three  oc- 
casions when  policemen  interfered  with  Socialists 
speaking  in  the  streets.     I  am  sure  the  Socialists  in 

317 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

question  could  have  regretted  the  circumstance  no 
more  than  I,  for  if  there  was  one  right  which  I 
tried  to  induce  the  police  to  respect,  it  was  the 
right  of  free  speech.  On  the  whole  they  did  fairly 
well,  and  at  a  time  when  there  seemed  to  be  an  epi- 
demic of  ferocity  among  municipal  officials  in  the 
land  that  led  them  to  all  sorts  of  unwarranted  in- 
terferences with  human  and  constitutional  rights,  we 
had  folk  of  all  sorts  preaching  their  strange  doc- 
trines in  our  streets — Republicans,  Democrats,  So- 
cialists, of  their  several  sorts,  I.  W.  W.'s,  evange- 
lists, anarchists,  suffragists,  Mormons,  Salvationists, 
to  say  nothing  of  all  the  religious  sects ;  wisdom  was 
veritably  crying  in  the  streets.  Emma  Goldman, 
during  that  period  of  hysteria  when  the  advent  of 
that  little  woman  in  a  city  precipitated  a  siege  of 
fear,  delivered  her  course  of  lectures  in  Toledo  to 
audiences  that  were  very  small,  since  there  were  no 
police  to  insure  the  attendance  of  those  who  were 
interested  more  in  sensations  than  in  her  philosophic 
discussions  of  the  German  drama.  And  we  tried 
to  respect  the  rights  of  all. 

But  it  is  one  thing  to  give  orders,  and  another  to 
have  them  implicitly  obeyed.  Those  of  the  indurated 
sectarian  mind,  who  would  order  all  life  by  mechan- 
ism, are  given  to  saying  that  if  they  were  in  author- 
ity the  police  would  do  so  and  so,  and  would  not  do 
such  and  such  a  thing,  that  they  would  have  the 
police  see  to  this  and  that,  etc.,  etc.,  etc.  After 
they  had  been  in  power  a  while  they  would  grow 
humble,  if  not  discouraged,  and,  like  me,  be  grati- 
fied if  they  succeeded  in  accomplishing  about  one- 

318 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

third  of  what  they  had  hoped  and  planned  to  ac- 
complish. Thus  I,  who  had  tried  to  give  everybody 
the  right  of  free  speech,  was  now  and  then  chagrined 
to  find  that  some  one  had  been  interfered  with  for 
preaching  some  new  heresy. 

The  right  of  free  speech  cherished  by  all  and  ex- 
ercised by  none,  since,  owing  to  a  disposition  on 
the  part  of  humanity  to  apply  the  hemlock  or  the 
noose  in  such  cases,  few  say  what  they  actually 
think,  is  one  which  certain  of  the  Socialists  pre- 
ferred to  have  honored  in  the  breach  rather  than  in 
the  observance.  They  would  be  never  so  happy, 
never  so  much  in  their  element  as  when  their  address 
was  interrupted;  the  greater  the  interference,  the 
more  acute  the  suffering  for  the  cause,  and  when  a 
man  begins  to  feel  that  there  is  in  him  the  blood  of 
the  martyrs,  which,  as  he  has  heard  somewhere,  is  the 
seed  of  the  churches,  why,  of  course,  he  is  in  such 
an  exalted  state  of  mind  that  there  is  no  human  way 
of  dealing  with  him. 

And  then  that  strange  human  spark,  that  mys- 
terious thing  we  call  personality,  is  always  there — 
that  element  which  makes  impossible  any  perfectly 
or  ideally  organized  state,  social  or  otherwise.  It 
is  assumed  by  those  of  the  order  of  mind  under  no- 
tice that  it  is  possible  so  to  organize  human  affairs 
that  they  will  work  automatically,  with  the  precision 
of  a  machine,  that  they  will  work  just  as  they  are 
intended  to  work  and  in  no  other  way,  that  it  is, 
indeed,  impossible  for  them  to  work  in  any  other 
way,  and  that  it  may  be  predicted  long  in  advance 
exactly  how  they  will  work  at  any  given  instant 

319 


FORTY   YEARS    OF   IT 

and  under  any  exigency,  or  circumstance.  This,  of 
course,  is  impossible,  as  everybody  knows,  except 
the  impossibilists.  That  is  why  they  are  impossi- 
bilists. 

These  speakers,  however,  who  would  dehumanize 
everything  yet  cannot  after  all  dehumanize  them- 
selves, would  frequently  court  arrest  in  the  belief 
that  the  meed  of  pseudo-martyrdom  thereby  made 
possible  was  an  ornament  to  their  cause,  and  they 
would  often  try  the  patience  of  officers,  who  like  the 
speakers  themselves  and  all  of  us,  are  unfortunately, 
or  perhaps  fortunately,  only  human.  Thus  a  Social- 
ist speaker  standing  on  his  soap-box,  in  the  course  of 
his  remarks,  indulged  in  certain  reflections  on  the 
police  as  an  institution.  His  sentiments  in  that  re- 
spect were  not  perhaps  heterodox,  from  the  stand- 
point of  my  own  orthodoxy,  but  we  had  been  try- 
ing to  create  esprit  de  corps  in  the  police  depart- 
ment, and  the  policeman  on  that  beat  chancing  to 
arrive  at  that  inauspicious  moment,  and  viewing  life 
from  an  altitude  less  lofty  and  impersonal  than  the 
Socialist  claimed  for  his  outlook,  took  the  scientific 
statements  of  the  Socialist  not  in  the  academic  sense, 
but  as  a  personal  reflection  upon  the  body  of  which 
he,  it  seems,  was  growing  rather  proud  of  being  a 
member,  and  at  the  conclusion  of  the  effort  he  pri- 
vately informed  the  speaker  that  if  he  said  anything 
more  against  the  Toledo  Police  Department  he  would 
"knock  his  block  off."  He  was  reprimanded  by  his 
lieutenant,  even  after  he  had  explained  that  he  in- 
tended to  execute  his  rude  intention  in  his  private 
and  not  in  his  official  capacity. 

320 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

The  incident  could  be  represented  by  the  Social- 
ists as  a  veritable  reflection  of  the  views  of  the  ad- 
ministration on  the  important  subject  of  Socialism, 
but  they  could  not  derive  quite  the  satisfaction  from 
it  they  had  in  another  incident,  or  accident,  which 
befell  the  most  prominent  and  authoritative  of  their 
local  leaders.  He  was  speaking  one  evening  in  a 
crowded  street,  when  he  had  the  good  fortune  to  be 
arrested  by  a  captain  of  police.  He  made  the  oc- 
casion the  opportunity  for  an  edifying  debate,  and 
lingered  as  long  as  the  captain  would  let  him;  but, 
in  the  end,  was  led  to  the  police  headquarters.  This 
was  the  irresistible  meeting  the  impenetrable.  While 
everybody  had  a  right  to  speak  his  mind  in  the 
streets,  everybody  else,  we  felt,  had  an  equal  right 
not  to  listen,  even  to  free  speech,  and  the  police 
had  orders  to  keep  the  streets  and  sidewalks  clear 
for  traffic.  Now  this  captain  was  a  chap  who  car- 
ried out  orders  given  to  him,  and,  as  he  was  in 
command  of  the  traffic  squad,  traffic  was  his  spe- 
cialty. If  streets  were  to  be  cleared,  then,  in  his 
philosophy,  they  were  to  be  cleared,  and  no  little 
thing  like  a  constitutional  inhibition  against  the 
abridgment  of  human  speech  would  stand  in  his  way. 
And  then,  after  all,  police  are  more  apt  to  arrest 
people  they  do  not  like  than  those  they  do,  and 
no  one  likes  those  who  disagree  with  him.  But  after 
the  arrest,  the  offender  is  turned  out  without  chances 
of  reparation.  In  this  instance,  feeling  that  the  So- 
cialist had  had  an  indignity  put  upon  him  by  his 
arrest,  while  I  could  not  undo  what  had  been  done, 
I  could  order  his  release  and  tender  him  an  official 

321 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

apology  in  writing,  which  was  accepted,  though  not 
acknowledged.  And  an  order  was  issued  that  a 
policemen  who  thereafter  interfered  with  any  voice 
crying  in  the  wilderness  should  be  dismissed  from 
the  department. 

LVI 

As  a  boy,  thirty  years  ago,  I  used  to  observe, 
with  a  boy's  interest,  the  little  bob-tailed  street  cars 
that  went  teetering  and  tinkling,  at  intervals  of 
half  an  hour,  out  a  long  street  that  ran  within  a 
block  of  my  home.  I  watched  the  cars  intently,  and 
so  intently  that  the  impressions  of  their  various 
colors,  sounds  and  smells  have  remained  with  me 
to  this  day,  speaking,  in  a  way,  of  the  conditions 
of  a  small  American  city  of  that  time,  and  affording 
a  means  by  which  to  measure  that  progress  in  ma- 
terial efficiency  which  is  so  often  mistaken  for  prog- 
ress in  speculative  thought. 

It  may  have  been  that  my  interest  was  intensi- 
fied by  the  fact  that  down  in  Urbana  Street  cars 
were  unknown,  though  they  were  not  unimagined, 
since  we  used  to  see  them  when  we  went  to  Cincin- 
nati, and  I  could  then,  and  I  can  still,  recall,  though 
time  has  softened  the  poignancy  of  that  hour,  the 
pain  of  parting  with  a  certain  noble  horse  which 
my  father  sold  to  a  man  of  dark  and  hateful  aspect, 
and  of  the  morsel  of  comfort  I  derived  from  the 
stipulation,  invalid  enough  to  be  sure,  my  father 
made  with  the  dealer,  that  the  horse  was  not  to  be 
put  to  street  car  service.     That,  by  my  father,  and 

322 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

so  by  me  myself,  was  held  to  be  the  most  cruel,  de- 
grading and  ignoble  fate  that  could  befall  a  horse. 
But  another  reason  for  my  interest  was  the  posses- 
sion of  a  curiosity  to  which  the  passing  show  has 
always  been  novel,  generally  amusing,  sometimes 
pleasing  and  often  saddening,  too — a  curiosity  in 
life  which  I  hope  will  endure  fresh  and  wholesome 
until  life's  largest  curiosity  shall  be  satisfied  at  the 
end  of  life. 

The  progress  of  the  little  street  car  under  notice 
was  leisurely  and  deliberate,  sometimes  it  would 
wait  obligingly  for  a  woman,  half  a  block  away,  who 
hurried  puffing,  and  fluttering,  and  waving,  to  reach 
the  street  corner,  and  when  she  had  clambered 
aboard,  the  driver  would  slowly  unwind  his  brake, 
cluck  to  his  horse,  the  rope  traces  would  strain 
and  the  car  would  bowl  along.  Ten  blocks  away 
from  the  business  section,  or  a  few  blocks  further 
on,  the  little  car  with  its  five  windows  and  small 
hooded  platform  would  enter  upon  a  bare,  though 
expectant  scene  of  vacant  lots,  and  about  a  mile 
out,  where  there  was  some  lonely  dwelling  staring 
blankly  and  reproachfully  as  though  it  had  been 
misled,  and  then  abandoned,  and  further  on  a  few 
small,  expectant  cottages,  the  long,  low  street  car 
barn  was  reached,  the  car  was  driven  on  to  a  little 
turntable,  slowly  turned  about  and  started  back. 
Sometimes,  if  I  was  lucky,  I  had  a  chance  to  witness 
the  change  of  horses,  and  to  experience  a  nebulous 
pity  for  the  nag  that  ambled  contentedly  into  the 
stable,  and  did  not  seem  to  be  very  tired  after  all. 

On  Summit  Street  there  were  grander  cars,  each 
323 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

drawn  by  two  horses,  and  there  were  other  lines  in 
town,  each  with  its  cars  painted  a  distinguishing 
color.  There  was  one  line  that  went  out  Colling- 
wood  Avenue,  far  to  the  very  country  itself ;  its  cars 
bowled  under  noble  trees  and  even  past  a  stately 
mansion  or  two,  or  what  in  those  days  seemed  stately 
mansions,  and  it  was  pleasant,  it  was  even  musical, 
to  hear  the  tinkle  of  the  bell  on  the  horse's  collar. 
Then  there  was  still  another  line  that  ran  down  the 
broad  Maumee  River,  almost  to  Maumee  Bay  and 
the  "marsh"  where  the  French  habitants  lived,  and 
spoke  delightfully  like  the  people  in  Dr.  Drummond's 
poems.  On  Saturday  mornings  my  father  was  likely 
to  send  me  on  an  errand  to  a  superannuated  clergy- 
man who  lived  down  there,  and  this  involved  a  long, 
irritating  journey.  The  journey  occupied  the  whole 
morning,  and  spoiled  a  holiday.  And  then  it  was 
always  cold,  for,  in  the  not  too  clear  retrospect,  I 
seem  to  have  been  sent  on  this  particular  errand 
only  in  winter,  and  the  car  was  the  coldest  place  in 
the  world,  especially  when  it  got  down  where  the 
winds  from  the  icy  lake  could  strike  it.  Its  floor 
was  strewn  recklessly  with  yellow  straw,  in  some 
ironical  pretense  of  keeping  the  car  warm,  and  I 
would  sit  there  with  feet  slowly  freezing  in  the 
rustling  straw,  and  after  I  had  inspected  the 
two  or  three  passengers,  there  -  was  nothing  t© 
do  but  to  read  the  notice  over  the  fare-box  in 
the  front  end  of  the  car,  until  I  had  it  quite  by 
heart : 

"The  driver  will  furnish  change  to  the  amount  of 
Two  Dollars,  returning  the  full  amount,  thus  en- 

324 


FORTY   YEARS    OF   IT 

abling  the  passenger  to  put  the  exact  fare  in  the 
box." 

Then  I  could  peer  up  toward  the  fare-box  and 
look  at  the  one  nickel  stranded  half-way  down  its 
zig-zag  chute,  and  look  at  the  driver,  standing  on 
the  front  platform,  slowly  rocking  from  one  foot  to 
the  other,  bundled  up  in  old  overcoats,  with  his  cap 
pulled  down  and  his  throat  and  chin  muffled  in  a  re- 
pulsive woolen  scarf,  hoary  with  the  frost  of  his 
breath,  and  nothing  of  him  visible  except  the  shining 
red  point  of  his  frosted  nose.  His  hands,  one  hold- 
ing the  reins,  the  other  the  brake-handle,  were  lost 
in  the  various  strata  of  mittens  that  marked  epochs 
co-extensive  with  those  of  the  several  overcoats.  I 
had  read  once  in  a  newspaper  of  a  street-car  driver 
in  Indianapolis  who,  at  the  end  of  his  run,  never 
moved,  but  kept  right  on  standing  there,  and  when 
the  barn-boss  swore  at  him,  it  was  found  that  he 
was  dead,  frozen  at  his  post.  And  I  sometimes  won- 
dered, as  I  dwelt  on  that  fascinating  horror,  if  it 
were  possible  that  sometime,  when  the  car  reached 
the  bay,  this  driver  would  not  be  found  frozen. 
Sometimes  I  expected  to  be  found  frozen  myself, 
but  nothing  exciting  ever  happened  on  that  journey, 
and  so,  somehow,  the  trips  out  other  streets  and 
other  avenues  in  other  cars,  remain  more  pleasantly 
in  the  memory,  associated  with  the  sunshine  and 
the  leafy  arch  of  green  overhead,  with  something  of 
the  romance  and  mystery  of  untraveled  roads  in  the 
long  vista  ahead,  while  the  winter  trip  down  to  the 
superannuated  clergyman's  is  cold  and  bleak  and 
desolate,  perhaps  because  it  had  no  more  interesting 

325 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

result  than  the  few  minutes  I  begrudged  in  that 
stiff  little  "parlor,"  where  the  preacher  received  me 
with  the  not  unkindly  regard  of  eyes  that  had  the 
dazed  expression  of  the  very  old.  I  can  expiate  the 
perfectly  patent  and  impolite  reluctance  with  which 
I  visited  the  aged  man,  and  the  thoughtless  con- 
tempt youth  has  for  age  itself,  only  by  the  hope  that 
those  dim  eyes  have  since  brightened  at  the  reali- 
zation of  those  glories  they  had  so  long  foreseen, 
which  formed  perhaps  the  only  consolation  of  a  life 
that  must  have  had  little  to  gladden  it  on  that  for- 
bidding spot. 

All  these  lines,  and  others  like  them  in  the 
sprawling  young  town,  belonged  each  to  different 
men,  and  once  I  happened  to  hear  that  the  man  who 
owned  the  line  first  mentioned  say  that  every  new 
family  that  moved  into  that  thoroughfare  or  built 
a  house  there,  meant  $73.00  a  year  to  him.  A  good 
many  families  moved  out  into  that  street,  enough 
indeed  to  make  a  settlement  that  was  a  town  in  itself, 
growing  and  spreading  at  the  end  of  the  line.  Grad- 
ually the  gaunt  vacancies  between  were  built  up, 
though  not,  it  appears,  until  the  man  had  grown 
discouraged  and  sold  out,  and  so  suffered  the  uni- 
versal fate  of  the  pioneer.  One  by  one  the  other 
lines  in  town  were  sold,  and  finally  a  day  came  when 
all  the  lines  were  owned  by  a  certain  few  men,  who 
under  our  purely  individualistic  legal  system,  formed 
a  company  and  thus  could  jointly  rejoice  in  all  the 
individual  rights  and  privileges  of  a  person,  without 
any  of  his  embarrassing  moral  duties  and  responsi- 
bilities. 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

I  ceased  to  hear  of  the  individual  owner  any 
more ;  I  never  saw  him  in  his  shirt  sleeves  in  his  little 
office  at  the  end  of  the  line  counting  up  the  nickels 
of  those  new  families  which  each  meant  $73.00  per 
annum  to  him,  and  it  must  have  been  about  the 
same  time  that  I  began  to  hear  of  the  traction  com- 
pany. There  had  been  probably  intervening  experi- 
ments with  tough  mules,  whom  no  one  pitied,  as 
everyone  had  pitied  the  horses  they  replaced,  and 
there  were,  in  other  cities,  astounding  miracles  of 
cable  cars  and  elevated  railways.  And  then  elec- 
tricity came  as  a  motive  power,  and  the  streets 
were  made  hideous  by  the  gaunt  poles  and  make- 
shifts of  wires,  and  the  trolley  cars  came,  and 
increased  in  size  and  numbers,  and  families  swarmed, 
until  out  on  those  streets  and  avenues  the  great 
yellow  cars  went  rushing  and  clanging  by,  with  mul- 
titudes of  people  clinging  to  the  straps  and,  toward 
evening,  swarming  like  flies  on  the  broad  rear  plat- 
forms, and  the  conductors  in  their  blue  uniforms 
shouting  "Step  lively !"  with  a  voice  as  authorita- 
tive as  that  which  the  company  spoke  in  the  city 
councils.  And  the  families  continued  to  arrive,  and 
to  build  houses,  and  to  toil  and  to  contribute  each 
its  $73.00  a  year,  though  they  did  it  with  human 
reluctance  and  complaint,  and  grew  dimly  conscious 
that  somewhere  in  the  whole  complicated  transac- 
tion an  injustice  lurked.  And  finally  this  hidden  in- 
justice became  the  chief  public  concern  of  the  people 
of  the  town,  and  an  issue  in  local  politics  for  more 
than  a  decade. 


327 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 


LVII 

It  had  been  an  issue,  as  I  have  more  than  once 
said  in  Jones's  time  and  in  his  campaigns,  though 
the  issues  his  tremendous  personality  raised  were 
so  vast  and  so  general  and  so  fundamental  that 
they  included  all  issues,  as  Emerson  said  his  reform 
included  all  reforms.  It  ran  like  a  scarlet  thread 
through  the  warp  and  woof  of  our  communal  life; 
it  was  somehow  associated  with  the  ambitions  of 
the  meanest  politician,  it  affected  the  fortunes  of 
every  man  in  business,  and  it  was  the  means  whereby 
the  community  came  to  have  an  ideal.  The  long 
story  of  it,  like  the  story  of  the  same  interest  in 
any  town,  would  include  triumphs  and  tragedies — 
and  the  way  of  politics  through  the  town  was  strewn 
with  the  pitiable  wrecks  of  character  and  of  life 
itself  that  had  been  ruthlessly  sacrificed  to  the  in- 
satiable greed  of  privilege.  Only  the  other  day  one 
such  wreck,  once  in  a  position  of  honor  and  trust  in 
the  municipality,  was  waiting  in  the  outer  office; 
he  wanted  half  a  dollar  and  a  place  to  sleep.  And 
another  like  him,  most  desperate  of  all,  asked  to  be 
committed  to  a  city  hospital  or  even  to  the  asylum 
for  the  insane;  he  had  no  other  refuge,  and  as  for 
the  poorhouse,  he  said,  not  yet,  not  yet!  And 
these  were  the  sacrifices  privilege  demanded  of  its 
parasites ;  though  their  case  morally,  at  least,  could 
be  no  worse  than  that  of  privilege's  principal  ben- 
eficiaries ;  not  half  so  bad  indeed,  since  they  had  lost 
the  power  of  appreciation  of  spiritual  values. 

328 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

I  knew  a  reporter,  an  Irish  lad,  whom  one  of  the 
attorneys  of  privilege  sought  to  '"befriend." 

"You  work  pretty  hard,  don't  you?"  asked  the 
attorney. 

"Yes,"  said  the  Irish  lad. 

"And  your  salary  is  small?" 

"Yes." 

"And  a  mortgage  on  your  mother's  home?"  The 
agents  of  privilege  always  know  a  man's  necessities! 

"Yes." 

"Well,  now,  I  can  tell  you  how  things  can  be  eased 
up  a  bit  for  you.     For  instance " 

After  the  proposal  had  been  artfully  made, 
the  Irish  lad  thought  a  moment,  and  then  he  raised 
those  blue  eyes  to  the  old  lawyer. 

"Your  wife  is  prominent  socially,  isn't  she?" 

"Why,  yes." 

"President  of — this  and  that,  eh?" 

"Yes." 

"And  your  daughters  just  home  from  a  finishing 
school  in  Europe,  aren't  they?" 

"Yes— but  what ?" 

"I  was  wondering,"  said  the  Irish  lad,  rising, 
"how  you  dared  go  home  at  night  and  look  'em  in 
the  face." 

Not  all  men  though  have  the  character,  the  moral 
resistance  of  that  Irish  lad,  and  the  scores  of  the 
weak  and  erring  ones  are  the  tragic  figures  in  the 
long  drama  of  the  traction  company  in  the  city, 
in  any  city — the  drama  that  can  not  be  written. 


329 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 


LVIII 

Meanwhile,  the  education  of  the  general  mind 
went  on,  and  we  were,  after  all,  tending  somewhither. 
Our  experience  in  the  greatest  of  our  tasks  demon- 
strated that,  and  in  the  change  that  gradually  took 
place  in  sentiment  concerning  the  street  railway 
problem,  there  was  an  evidence  of  the  development 
of  a  mass  consciousness,  a  mass  will,  which  some 
time  in  these  cities  of  ours  will  justify  democracy. 
It  is  of  course  the  most  difficult  process  in  the  world, 
for  a  mass  of  two  hundred  thousand  people  to  unite 
in  the  expression  of  a  will  concerning  a  single  ab- 
stract proposition.  The  mass  to  be  sure  can  now 
and  then  as  it  were  rear  its  head  and  blaze  forth 
wrath  and  accomplish  some  instant  work  of  destruc- 
tion ;  even  if  it  be  nothing  more  than  the  destruction 
of  an  individual  reputation.  That  is  why  the  recall 
is  so  popular  and  so  generously  and  frequently  em- 
ployed in  those  cities  that  have  it.  In  such  elections, 
with  their  personal  and  human  center  of  interest,  the 
people  all  turn  out,  while  in  a  referendum  involving 
some  abstract  principle,  the  vote  cast  is  always 
small.  That  is  why  the  referendum  is  so  important, 
and  the  recall,  relatively,  so  unimportant;  the  use 
of  the  first  in  the  long  run  will  afford  a  fine  school- 
ing for  the  people. 

The  most  familiar  expression  of  this  rage  of 
course  was  the  clamor  for  the  indictment  and  im- 
prisonment of  some  one  connected  in  sinister  ways 
with  the  company,  a  demand  with  which  I  never  had 

330 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

the  slightest  sympathy,  to  which  I  could  never 
yield  the  slightest  acquiescence.  What  good,  though 
all  the  poor  and  miserable  servitors  of  privilege 
were  put  in  prison,  while  privilege  itself  remained? 
Such  clamors  have  had  their  results ;  a  few  more 
broken  lives,  a  little  more  sorrow  and  shame  in  the 
world,  and  the  clamor  ceases,  and  things  go  on  the 
same  as  before. 

It  is  this  instability,  this  variableness,  this  weari- 
ness of  the  public  mind,  on  which  privilege  depends, 
with  a  cynical  trust  so  often  justified  that  it  might 
breed  cynicism  in  all  observant  and  reflective  na- 
tures. The  street  railway  proprietors  in  Toledo 
expected  each  election  to  demonstrate  this  weari- 
ness in  the  people,  and  to  restore  them  to,  or  at  least 
confirm  them  in,  the  privileges  they  had  enjoyed 
under  the  old  regime. 

For  a  people  to  assume  and  for  a  decade  con- 
sistently to  maintain  an  attitude  toward  a  public 
question  therefore  was  a  triumph  of  the  democratic 
principle.  That  is  what  the  people  of  Cleveland 
did;  that  is  what  the  people  of  Detroit  did;  that 
is  what  the  people  of  Toledo  did.  The  successive 
stages  of  this  process  were  most  interesting  to  ob- 
serve, the  more  especially  since  they  caught  in  the 
movement  even  some  of  the  street  railway  group 
and  its  political  confreres  themselves. 

In  its  origin  the  public  will  was  destructive  no 
doubt,  that  was  the  inarticulate  disgust  born  of  the 
long  endurance  of  inadequate  service,  all  the  mis- 
eries of  that  contemptuous  exploitation  of  the 
people  so  familiar  in  all  the  cities  of  America.     To 

331 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

this,  on  the  customary  revelations  of  a  corrupt  dom- 
ination of  the  political  machinery  of  the  city  by  the 
street  railway  company,  there  was  added  a  moral 
rage — the  one  element  needed  to  provide  the  spark 
for  the  mine.  At  first  this  rage  against  the  company 
was  such  that  any  action  taken  by  officials  was  pop- 
ular so  long  as  it  injured  or  harassed  or  was 
somehow  inimical  to  the  company.  And  in  conse- 
quence there  was  developed  a  kind  of  local  jingoism 
or  chauvinism;  whenever  popularity  slackened  or  it 
was  felt  necessary  to  remind  the  electorate  back  in 
the  ward  of  the  sleepless  vigilance  of  their  represen- 
tative in  the  council,  a  councilman  had  only  to  in- 
troduce some  resolution  that  would  be  against  the 
company's  interest.  It  was  unfortunate,  and  had  its 
evil  phase,  as  any  suggestion  of  intellectual  dis- 
honesty must  ever  have,  and  it  made  serious  dealing 
with  the  subject  extremely  difficult  and  hazardous. 
It  was  difficult  to  recognize  any  of  the  company's 
rights ;  and  it  was  always  at  the  risk  of  misunder- 
standing, and  with  the  certainty  of  misrepresenta- 
tion that  this  was  done.  But  of  course  it  was 
necessary  to  do  this,  in  the  course  of  the  long  and 
complicated  transaction,  that  constant  and  inflexi- 
ble opposition  of  the  public  with  the  private  inter- 
est which  now  assumed  the  aspect  of  a  noisy  and 
furious  war,  and  now  the  softer  phases  of  diplomatic 
negotiations.  Of  course  there  were  always  those 
in  town  who  knew  exactly  what  was  to  be  done ;  they 
could  settle  the  vexatious  problem  with  a  facile  ges- 
ture, between  the  whiffs  of  a  cigarette  on  the  back 
platform  of  a  street  car,  or  in  an  after  dinner  speech 
'332 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

between  the  puffs  of  a  cigar.  The  one  was  apt 
to  advise  that  the  "traction  company  be  brought 
to  time  at  once,"  the  other  that  an  "equitable"  set- 
tlement be  "arranged"  by  conservative  business 
men.  Meanwhile  the  problem  obviously  consisted 
in  the  necessity  of  recognizing  the  private  right  in 
the  proprietors  and  of  securing  the  public  right  to 
the  people,  and  to  do  this  it  was  necessary  to  search 
out,  and  isolate,  like  some  malignant  organism,  the 
injustice  that  somewhere  lurked  in  this  complex  and 
irritating   association. 

In  my  first  campaign  we  proposed  to  grant  no 
renewal  of  franchises  at  a  rate  of  fare  higher  than 
three  cents.  Jones  had  advised  it,  and  I  had  been 
committed  to  it  long  before.  It  was  Tom  Johnson's 
old  slogan,  and  it  was  popular.  I  used  to  explain  to 
the  crowds  my  own  conviction  that  the  problem 
never  would  be  settled  until  we  had  municipal  owner- 
ship, but  there  was  in  Toledo  in  those  days  very 
little  sentiment  for  municipal  ownership,  and  my 
conviction  met  with  no  applause,  and  was  received 
only  with  mild  toleration.  In  the  second  campaign, 
there  was  more  indorsement;  in  the  third  there  was 
a  certain  enthusiasm  for  the  principle,  in  the  fourth 
it  seemed  to  be  almost  unanimous,  and  now  the  prin- 
ciple has  become  one  of  the  cardinal  articles  of 
faith.  I  do  not  wish  it  to  appear  that  I  had  con- 
verted all  these  people  to  my  view;  I  had  not  tried 
to  do  that,  and  doubtless  could  not  have  done  so 
had  I  tried,  but  the  conviction  came  by  the  very 
necessities   of  the  situation. 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 


LIX 

Those  men  who  ventured  early  into  the  street  car 
business  were  pioneers ;  they  assumed  large  risks,  and 
they  rendered  a  public  service.  They  had  the  cour- 
age to  undertake  experiments;  they  had  faith  that 
the  town  would  grow  and  become  in  time  a  city. 
And  they  staked  all  on  the  chance.  They  had  little 
difficulty,  if  they  had  any  at  all,  in  securing  fran- 
chises from  the  city  to  use  the  streets,  for  the  people 
of  the  city  were  glad  to  have  the  convenience  of 
transportation.  Indeed  many  of  the  lines  were  com- 
munity enterprises,  organized  by  the  men  of  a  given 
neighborhood  for  the  sake  of  the  transportation 
merely,  and  not  with  any  notion  of  personal  profit. 

Franchise  ordinances  then  were  loosely  drawn; 
men  had  no  conception  of  what  changes  the  future 
was  to  bring  about,  they  lacked  the  imagination 
to  prefigure  it,  the  faith  to  believe  it,  and  so  the 
street  car  promoters  who  came  along  a  little  later 
were  the  heirs  of  advantages  which  otherwise  they 
would  not  have  obtained.  Under  these  advantages, 
these  privileges,  they  or  their  immediate  grantees 
were  enabled  to  take  over  for  their  own  use  and 
profit  the  enormous  social  values  that  were  being 
created  in  cities,  not  by  them,  but  by  all  those  fam- 
ilies who  moved  in,  and  toiled,  and  wrought  and 
built  the  modern  city. 

This  was  the  first  phase  of  the  street  car  busi- 
ness, its  experimental  stage,  commensurate  with  the 
rapid,  disordered  growth  of  the  city  in  the  middle 

334 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

and  western  states  of  America.  Few  indeed  of  the 
pioneers  in  the  business  became  wealthy;  many  no 
doubt  lost  their  money,  though  they  tried  in  vain 
to  vary  or  improve  their  fortunes  through  the 
changes  that  were  rapidly  developing  the  mighty 
problem  of  transporting  the  crowded  populations 
of  our  cities.  There  were,  for  instance,  the  days 
when  mules  were  substituted  for  horses,  and  sacri- 
ficed rapidly  and  ruthlessly  on  the  principle  that 
it  was  cheaper  to  replace  them  than  to  care  for 
them,  a  system  about  as  bad  in  its  consuming  cruelty 
as  that  adopted  by  some  factories  with  reference 
to  their  human  employees.  Then,  in  a  few  of  the 
larger  cities,  there  were  the  cable  cars,  but  the 
second  phase  came  with  the  adoption  of  electricity 
as  a  motive  power,  and  the  coincident  development, 
almost  a  miracle,  of  the  towns  of  middle  and  western 
America  into  real  cities. 

With  electricity  as  a  motive  power,  and  the  con- 
sequent cheapening  of  operation,  the  street  car  busi- 
ness entered  upon  its  second  phase,  and  it  ushered  in 
at  once  the  era  of  speculation  in  franchises  and 
social  values,  watered  stocks  and  bonds.  The  era 
of  exploitation  came  upon  us,  and  out  of  these  privi- 
leges, out  of  other  privileges  to  conduct  other  pub- 
lic utilities,  i.  e.,  privileges  to  absorb  social  values, 
enormous  fortunes  were  made,  with  all  the  evils  that 
come  with  a  vulgar,  newly-rich  plutocracy.  To 
keep,  and  extend,  and  renew  these  privileges,  they 
must  have  their  lawyers,  and  their  newspapers  to 
mislead  and  debauch  the  public  mind;  they  must 
go  into  politics,  organize  and  control  the  machines 

335 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

of  both  parties,  bribe  councilmen  and  legislators 
and  jurors,  and  even  have  judges  on  the  bench  sub- 
servient to  their  will,  so  that  the  laws  of  the  state 
and  the  grants  of  the  municipality  might  be  con- 
strued in  their  favor.  The  sordid,  tragic  tale  of 
their  domination  of  municipal  politics  is  now  uni- 
versally known,  and  in  the  tale  may  be  read  the 
causes  of  most  of  our  municipal  misrule.  It  hap- 
pened in  Toledo  as  it  happened  everywhere,  such  is 
the  inexorability  of  the  general  law,  and  the  popular 
reaction  was  the  same. 

And  so  we  came  upon  a  new,  the  third  stage, 
since  I  have  set  out  to  be  scientific  in  analysis  of 
tractions,  and  the  very  name  by  which  these  big 
enterprises  have  latterly  been  called,  that  is,  public 
service  corporations,  suggests  the  meaning  and 
indicates  the  significance  of  that  era*  Two  facts, 
or  principles,  had  become  perfectly  apparent;  first, 
that  transportation,  the  primal  necessity  of  a  mod- 
ern city,  is  a  natural  monopoly,  and  must  be 
treated  as  such.  Second,  that  if  these  public  utility 
corporations  are  to  continue  to  hold  these  monopo- 
lies, they  must  become  public  service  corporations 
indeed,  that  is,  they  must  serve  the  public.  No  more, 
then,  the  old  corporation  contempt  of  the  people, 
at  least  outwardly  expressed,  but  a  softer  voice  in 
addressing  them,  and  a  new  respect,  perhaps  grown 
sincere.  Their  old  lobbyists  disappeared  from  the 
council  chamber  and  the  city  hall — for  eight  years 
they  were  not  seen  there.  The  companies  had  been 
primarily  profit  making  institutions  and  only  inci- 
dentally for  public  service,  they  were  operated  for 

336 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

the  private  benefit  of  their  owners  in  contempt  of 
public  right ;    the  service  was  secondary. 

We  may  say  that  this  third  era  is  the  era  of 
regulation,  or,  as  it  is  more  apt  to  be,  attempted 
regulation,  by  the  city,  in  which  the  principle  of 
the  public  interest  as  paramount  to  the  private  in- 
terest is  to  be  the  basis  on  which  a  private  company 
shall  be  permitted  to  operate.  This  era  will  endure 
long  enough  to  demonstrate  itself  a  failure,  the  gen- 
eral mind  will  continue  to  learn,  to  inform  itself, 
democracy  will  develop  new  functions,  and  we  shall 
enter  on  the  fourth,  and  perhaps  the  final  stage, 
that  of  municipal  ownership. 


LX 


We  came  upon  the  scene  just  when  the  discus- 
sion was  emerging  from  the  second  into  the  third 
of  those  phases  into  which  I  have  divided  the  de- 
velopment of  the  problem.  The  franchises  granted 
almost  a  generation  before  were  about  to  expire, 
and  new  arrangements  between  the  city  and  the 
traction  company,  the  Big  Con,  as  the  newspaper 
argot  would  have  it.  Chicago  had  already,  or  al- 
most, gone  through  her  settlement;  and  though  the 
settlement  was  pretty  bad,  it  nevertheless  recog- 
nized the  principle  that  the  value  of  a  street  rail- 
way franchise  is  a  public,  social,  or  communal  value, 
produced  by  the  community,  and  therefore  belonged 
to  the  community.  In  Toledo  the  company  had  but 
about    $5,000,000    of    actual   investment,    while    it 

337 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

had  a  capitalization  in  stocks  and  bonds  of  nearly 
$30,000,000,  and  the  difference  of  $25,000,000  was 
the  community  value  which  the  magnates  had  been 
exploiting  for  their  own  benefit.  We  simply  pro- 
posed that  this  value  should  be  returned  to  the 
people.  We  proposed,  then,  that  the  rate  of  fare 
to  be  charged  by  the  company  should  be  large 
enough  and  only  large  enough  to  pay  a  reasonable 
return  on  the  actual  investment  and  to  provide  good 
service,  a  service  that  was  to  be  dictated,  regu- 
lated and  controlled  by  the  city.  This  principle  had 
been  established,  or  at  least  admitted  in  the  Chicago 
settlement,  and  the  same  thing  had  been  done, 
though  on  a  sounder  and  more  scientific  basis  in 
Cleveland,  where  Tom  Johnson's  long  and  gallant 
and  intelligent  contest  already  in  effect  had  been 
won.  Over  in  Detroit  the  same  principles  had  been 
deduced,  though  the  discussion  there  was  so  pro- 
longed, as  proved  ultimately  to  be  the  case  in  To- 
ledo, that  the  people  demanded  municipal  owner- 
ship, without  passing  through  the  intervening  ex- 
perimental stage  of  regulation  and  control. 

There  is  of  course  nothing  sacrosanct  in  three- 
cent  fares.  The  movement  of  the  people,  which  at 
the  same  time,  in  the  old  Russian  phrase  of 
Kropotkin,  was  a  movement  toward  the  people,  had 
become  an  agitation  for  this  rate.  It  had  been  be- 
gun years  before  by  Mayor  Pingree  in  Detroit,  and 
was  taken  up  in  Cleveland  by  Tom  Johnson,  whose 
whole  career  in  a  romantic  manner,  at  once  em- 
bodied and  illustrated  the  history  of  the  street 
railway  problem  in  the  American  city.     The  adop- 

338 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

tion  of  the  phrase  as  a  shibboleth  or  slogan  of  the 
progressive  forces  was  simply  and  easily  explained, 
for  in  the  mind  of  Johnson  and  in  the  minds  of  those 
who  were  like  him  or  were  influenced  by  him,  the 
difference  between  the  prevailing  fare  of  five  cents 
and  the  proposed  fare  of  three  cents  somehow  meas- 
ured the  franchise  value,  or  that  social  value  which 
belonged  to  the  people.  Tom  Johnson,  indeed,  used 
often  to  say  that  he  favored  a  three-cent  fare  simply 
because  it  was  two  cents  nearer  nothing,  thereby 
revealing  a  glimpse  of  his  dream  of  a  social  order  in 
which  the  municipality  would  provide  transporta- 
tion just  as  it  provides  sidewalks,  sewers,  bridges, 
etc.,  all  of  which  are  paid  for  at  the  treasury  in 
taxes.  It  was  believed  and  held  by  all  of  us,  that 
this  franchise  value  should  be  reclaimed  or  retained 
by  the  people  in  this  direct  and  simple  manner  of 
lowering  the  fare. 

There  was  never  any  notion,  of  course,  of  inter- 
fering in  any  way  with  the  existing  rights  of  the 
company;  it  was  to  have  all  that  to  which  it  was 
entitled  under  its  old  franchises  or  contracts.  But 
it  was  proposed  that  when  we  came  to  draw  a  new 
contract,  the  political  relations  of  the  city  and  the 
company  were  to  be  considered  as  of  paramount 
importance,  using  the  word  "political,"  of  course  in 
its  old  authentic  sense,  and  not  as  expressing  in  any 
wise  the  sinister  thing  it  has  come  to  connote  in  the 
popular  mind.  We  were  determined  to  meet  not  only 
the  conditions  of  the  present,  but  to  do  what  our 
forerunners  in  office  had  never  done,  that  is,  to  pro- 
tect the  interests  of  the  people  of  the  future.    I  sup- 

339 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

pose  this  sounds  very  much  like  the  trite  generalities 
of  the  politician,  but  we  sincerely  tried  to  express 
the  theory  with  definiteness  and  particularity.  We 
sought  not  only  a  reduction  of  the  fare  and  a  regu- 
lation of  the  service  in  the  public  interest,  but  we 
wished  to  provide  for  that  future  day  when,  as  a 
result  of  the  certain  growth  of  the  city,  the  sure 
improvement  in  transportation  facilities,  and  the  in- 
evitable development  of  the  democratic  function,  the 
municipality  is  to  undertake  these  enterprises  as  a 
proper  public  function. 

It  was  these  principles  we  tried  to  bear  in  mind 
in  those  long  negotiations  which  we  held  all  during 
the  months  of  one  spring  and  summer  over  that 
big  table  in  the  council  chamber.  We  were  nervous 
when  we  entered  upon  this  work,  nervous  as  are 
those  who  enter  the  finals  in  some  tournament  of 
sport;  we  did  not  know  much  about  the  subject, 
and  we  were  confronted  by  the  street  railway  mag- 
nates and  their  clever  lawyers.  But  we  could  learn 
as  we  went  along,  and  we  always  had  to  our  assist- 
ance Newton  Baker  over  in  Cleveland,  and  Peter 
Witt,  and  Carl  Nau,  whom  we  had  employed  as  the 
city's  accountant  when  the  time  came  at  last  when 
we  could  examine  the  company's  books ;  they  had  all 
gone  through  the  long  civil  war  in  Cleveland,  as 
had  Professor  Edward  W.  Bemis,  whom  we  after- 
wards engaged  in  his  quality  of  expert  adviser  on 
valuations. 

Perhaps  at  first  we  laid  too  great  stress  on  three- 
cent  fares,  though  I  do  not  know  how  we  could  have 
done  otherwise.    Dr.  Delos  F.  Wilcox,  who  has  writ- 

340 


FORTY   YEARS    OF   IT 

ten  an  excellent  work  on  the  whole  subject,  had 
advised  us  indeed  that  a  disproportionate  amount 
of  energy  and  effort  had  already  been  expended — 
not  by  us,  only,  but  by  all  those  in  other  cities  who 
were  in  similar  struggles — in  the  direction  of  low 
fares.  He  pointed  out,  I  remember,  that  five  cents 
in  that  day  was  worth  little  more  than  three  cents 
or  three  and  a  half  cents  had  been  a  decade  before, 
according  to  the  scale  of  prices  then  current;  he 
thought  that  in  terms  of  general  prices  the  public 
had  already  secured  three-cent  fares  without  know- 
ing it.  It  was  a  question  of  some  subtlety  and  some 
intricacy,  to  be  left  to  economists ;  we  could  not 
feel  that  our  battle  had  been  won  so  easily,  and  we 
did  not  undertake  to  console  the  people  with  the 
recondite  theory.  We  had  before  us,  in  vision,  and 
sometimes  in  their  corporeal  reality,  the  weary  and 
exasperated  strap-hangers,  and  the  human  sardines 
on  the  rear  platform  with  their  valid  complaints; 
they  all  wanted  low  fares,  good  service,  and  seats. 
An  old  street  car  man  once  said  that  to  provide 
seats  for  everybody  is  an  impossibility,  and  to 
prove  this  assertion  he  humorously  classified  hu- 
manity into  three  groups:  "workers,  clerkers  and 
shirkers."  Each  morning,  he  said,  the  workers  go 
down  at  seven,  the  clerkers  at  eight,  and  the  shirk- 
ers at  nine,  and  that  therefore  it  is  easy  to  pro- 
vide them  all  with  seats  in  the  morning  hours;  but 
that  as  all  three  classes  wish  to  go  home  at  the 
same  hour  in  the  evening,  it  is  then  physically  im- 
possible to  provide  them  all  with  seats. 

But  whether  or  not  too  great  stress  was  laid  on 
341 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

three-cent  fares  we  learned  during  those  months  of 
wearisome  and  futile  negotiations,  that  the  theory 
was  not  scientific.  The  people  were  entitled  to 
their  money's  worth  in  service,  the  company  to  ade- 
quate pay  for  the  service  it  rendered,  and  as  the 
basis  of  the  whole  transaction  was  a  public  neces- 
sity, the  city  had  the  right  to  control  the  service,  to 
dictate  what  it  should  be.  The  old  theory  was  that 
the  people  existed  for  the  street  car  company;  the 
new  principle  was  quite  the  reverse;  the  street  car 
company  was  but  a  temporary  instrument  of  social 
service,  and  the  social  right  was  paramount  to  all 
others. 

The  company  therefore  was  entitled  to  a  fare 
sufficient  to  enable  it  to  provide  the  service  thus 
demanded,  and  to  do  this  it  must  charge  enough  to 
pay  its  operating  expenses,  taxes,  and  interest, 
enough  to  meet  the  cost  of  improvements  and  depre- 
ciation, and  to  pay  a  reasonable  return  on  its  in- 
vestment. It  was  not  entitled  to  any  speculative 
return.  There  was  no  longer  on  the  company's  part 
that  risk  its  predecessors  in  interest,  the  pioneers  or 
promoters  or  whatever  they  were,  had  been  com- 
pelled to  take;  its  investment  was  no  longer  pre- 
carious ;  nothing,  indeed,  could  be  more  certain  than 
the  stability  of  street  railway  investments.  Their 
securities,  based  upon  a  public  necessity,  supported 
by  the  diurnal  comings  and  goings  of  all  those  thou- 
sands and  hundreds  of  thousands  of  people,  had  be- 
come in  a  certain  very  real  sense,  a  fixed  burden 
upon  the  people  of  the  city,  a  burden  as  fixed  and 
inevitable  as  taxes.     In  the  hands  of  private  owners 

342 


FORTY   YEARS    OF   IT 

such  securities,  under  a  franchise  ordinance  properly 
drawn,  partake  largely  of  the  character  of  municipal 
bonds,  which  indeed  they  resemble  in  fundamentals 
and  ends.  The  issue  of  securities  was  therefore  to 
be  as  jealously  guarded  as  an  issue  of  municipal 
bonds,  and  overcapitalization,  the  prolific  source  of 
so  much  evil,  was  to  be  prevented.  The  enterprise 
had  become  as  stable  as  any  human  institution  can 
be,  and  with  the  limited  risk  there  was  to  be  applied 
the  familiar  principle  of  limited  profit.  The  prin- 
ciple was  recognized  in  Cleveland,  where  the  return 
fixed  as  reasonable  was  6  per  cent,  which  is  but  little 
more  than  municipal  bonds  pay.  And  when  this 
principle  is  established,  municipal  ownership  almost 
automatically  follows ;  investors  used  to  large  spec- 
ulative profits,  are  ready  to  sell  out  to  the  munici- 
pality; thus,  by  indirection,  democracy  comes  into 
her  own. 

It  was  easy  enough  to  fix  most  of  the  elements 
of  this  return;  the  accountants  could  do  that,  in 
their  intricate  discussions  of  car-miles  and  curves 
and  straight  lines  of  depreciation  and  points  of 
saturation  in  traffic,  and  all  that,  but  the  tre- 
mendous difficulty  was  to  determine  just  what  the 
investment  was  and  what  was  a  reasonable  return 
on  that  investment. 

It  is  this  pass  to  which  all  such  negotiations,  con- 
ducted in  sincerity,  come  at  last;  it  is  this  on  which 
the  whole  question  hinges,  it  is  this  that  might  as 
well  be  done  first  as  last,  namely,  to  evaluate  the 
property  of  the  company.  It  is  necessary  not  only 
to  get  at  the  investment  and  the  return  thereon,  but 

343 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

to  ascertain  what  the  city  must  pay  when  it  comes 
to  take  over  the  street  railway  system. 

But  we  did  not  do  it  at  first,  and  we  did  not  do 
it  at  last.  At  first  it  was  impossible  to  get  it  into 
the  councilmanic  head  that  it  was  at  all  necessary, 
especially  since  it  cost  money  to  retain  the  "ex- 
pertsi"  as  they  are  called,  to  do  the  work.  They 
were  prone  to  that  old  vice  of  the  human  mind  which 
leads  it  to  imagine  that  when  it  has  stated  the  end 
to  be  achieved  it  has  at  the  same  time  stated  the 
means  of  achieving  it, — like  the  advice  to  the  bash- 
ful man  "to  assume  an  easy  and  graceful  attitude, 
especially  in  the  presence  of  ladies" — and  when 
council  was  finally  convinced  and  had  provided  the 
funds  for  the  experts,  we  could  not  agree  as  to  who 
should  be  employed.  That  is,  the  human  equation 
was  apparent.  There  was  unhappily  nobody  but 
men  to  make  evaluations,  and  all  the  engineers  who 
were  competent  were  employed  by  street  railway 
companies,  and  expected  or  hoped  to  continue  to  be 
employed  by  street  railway  companies,  and  they  had 
evolved  so  many  fantastic  notions  of  "intangible" 
value  that  they  could  account  for  almost  any  ex- 
cess in  artificial  capitalization,  and  make  the 
grossest  exhibition  of  corporate  greed  in  watering 
stocks  appear  like  veritable  self  denial  in  frugality 
and  economy.  We  selected  Professor  Bemis  to  rep- 
resent the  city,  because  he  was  one  of  the  few  of 
the  "experts"  committed  to  the  people's  cause;  he 
had  advised  Tom  Johnson  throughout  his  long  war. 
But  the  company  never  could  be  brought  to  select 
anybody,  or  to  agree  upon  the  third  arbiter — even 

344 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

to  accept  the  Judge  of  the  United  States  Circuit 
Court  when,  against  the  advice  of  the  whole  admin- 
istrative circle,  I  proposed  him. 

Again  and  again  in  our  prolonged  negotiations 
we  returned,  as  in  a  vicious  circle,  to  this  point; 
again  and  again  we  reached  this  impasse. 


LXI 

Meanwhile,  the  franchises  were  expiring,  and  the 
time  drew  on  when  the  company  would  have  no 
rights  left  in  the  streets.  And  here  was  the  oppor- 
tunity for  the  mind  that  had  the  power,  or  the 
defect,  of  isolating  propositions,  of  regarding  them 
as  absolute,  of  ignoring  the  intricate  relativity  of 
life.  "Put  the  company  off  the  streets,"  was  the 
cry ;  "make  it  stop  running  its  cars ;  bring  it  to  its 
knees."  However,  we  could  not  bring  the  company 
to  its  knees  without  bringing  the  riders  to  their 
feet;  we  could  not  put  the  company  off  the  streets, 
without  at  the  same  time  and  by  the  same  process, 
putting  the  people  on  the  streets;  when  the  cars 
stopped  running  the  people  began  walking.  The 
public  convenience  was  paramount. 

Then  Mr.  Cornell  Schreiber,  the  City  Solicitor, 
hit  upon  a  plan.  He  drew  an  ordinance  providing 
that  the  company  could  use  the  streets  wherein  its 
rights  had  expired,  only  on  the  condition  that  it 
carry  passengers  at  a  three-cent  fare,  and  the  ordi- 
nance was  at  once  passed  by  the  council.  It  was 
of  doubtful  legality,  but  it  had  its  effect  in  a  world 

345 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

of  human  beings.  Before  it  was  effective  even,  peo- 
ple were  tendering  three  cents  as  fare ;  and  in  the  face 
of  the  difficulty  of  dealing  with  a  whole  populace  in 
this  mood,  the  company  agreed  to  put  in  force  a 
temporary  rate  of  three  cents  during  the  rush  hours 
of  the  morning  and  evening,  and  it  lowered  fares  in 
the  other  hours  and  made  further  concessions.  And 
there  we  let  the  matter  rest. 

And,  since  the  education  of  the  general  mind 
never  stops,  the  people  were  learning.  Their 
patience  was  time  and  again  exhausted  by  the  un- 
avoidable length  of  the  franchise  dispute,  for  the 
problem  was  to  them,  as  to  most  Americans,  new,  the 
legal  questions  in  which  the  whole  subject  was 
prolific  had  not  been  settled,  there  was  the  inter- 
ruption of  business  and  convenience  and  pleasure 
attending  long  continued  negotiations,  and  perhaps 
more  than  all  that  irritation  of  the  public  temper 
which  proceeds  from  all  communal  disputes.  The 
company's  representatives  counted  on  all  this  to  tire 
the  people  out ;  and  since  the  controversy  assumed  a 
political  complexion,  and  there  was  as  always  the 
difficulty  of  sustaining  the  mass  will,  they  had  hopes 
that  by  delay  the  people  in  weariness  would  sur- 
render. The  time  came  when  the  sentiment  in  favor 
of  municipal  ownership  was  so  strong  that  the  In- 
dependents adopted  the  view  I  had  expressed  and 
declared  it  to  be  their  purpose  to  grant  no  re- 
newals of  franchises  at  all,  but  to  let  the  company 
operate  on  sufferance  until  the  city  itself  could  take 
over  the  lines. 

During  the  course  of  the  long  struggle  a  change 
346 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

had  come  over  the  spirit  of  the  people,  and  this 
change  had  been  reflected  in  the  laws.  The  great- 
est difficulty  had  been  found  in  the  city's  want 
of  autonomy;  the  cities  of  Ohio  not  only  lacked  the 
power  to  own  and  operate  public  utilities,  but  they 
even  had  few  rights  in  contracting  with  the  private 
companies.  The  street  car  companies  had  always 
been  more  ably  and  assiduously  represented  in  the 
state  legislature  than  had  the  people  themselves ; 
the  people  had  not  had  the  strength  to  wrest  these 
powers  from  the  legislature,  and  indeed,  in  their  pa- 
tience and  toryism,  they  had  not  made  many  efforts 
to  do  so.  Thus  our  campaign  led  us  out  into  the 
state,  and  the  end,  toward  which  we  had  to  struggle, 
was  the  free  city ;  the  last  of  our  demands  was  home 
rule.  In  the  relations  between  public  utility  corpo- 
rations and  the  municipality,  our  cities  were  a  whole 
generation  behind  the  cities  of  Great  Britain,  Ger- 
many, France  and  Belgium.  Indeed,  in  relation  to 
all  social  functions  we  were  not  much  further  ad- 
vanced than  was  Rome  in  the  second  century. 

As  to  the  medieval  cities  of  Italy,  the  free  cities 
of  Germany  and  the  cities  of  Great  Britain,  strug- 
gling all  of  them  against  some  overlord,  some  king, 
noble  or  bishop,  so  at  last  there  came  to  our  cities  a 
realization  of  the  vassalage  they  were  under.  Their 
destinies  were  in  the  hands  of  the  country  politicians 
in  the  state  legislature  who  had  no  sympathy  with 
city  problems,  because  they  had  no  understanding 
of  them.  Oftenest  indeed  they  had  a  contempt  for 
them,  they  all  held  to  the  Puritan  ideal.  But  a  de- 
mand for  freedom  went  up  from   Cleveland,   from 

347 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

Cincinnati,  from  Columbus,  from  Toledo.  The  legis- 
lature began  to  make  its  reluctant  concessions;  it 
gave  cities,  for  instance,  the  right  to  have  street 
railway  franchises  referred  to  the  people  for  ap- 
proval or  rejection.  And  at  last  in  the  great  awak- 
ening, the  state  constitution  was  ultimately  amended 
and  cities  were  given  home  rule.  It  was  the  irony  of 
life  that  Golden  Rule  Jones  and  Tom  Johnson  could 
not  have  lived  to  see  that  day! 


LXII 

A  few  weeks  after  my  election  to  a  fourth  term 
I  wrote  out  and  gave  to  the  reporters  a  state- 
ment in  which  I  said  that  I  would  not  be  again  a 
candidate  for  the  office  of  mayor.  I  had  been  think- 
ing of  my  old  ambition  in  letters,  and  of  those  nov- 
els I  had  planned  to  write.  Already  I  had  been  six 
years  in  office  and  I  had  not  written  a  novel  in  all 
that  time.  And  here  I  was,  just  entering  upon  an- 
other term.  If  ever  I  were  to  write  those  novels 
I  would  better  be  about  it,  before  I  grew  too  old 
and  too  tired.  The  politicians,  regarding  all  such 
statements  as  but  the  professional  insincerities  of 
their  trade,  could  not  consider  my  decision  seriously 
of  course,  or  credit  its  intention.  They  were  some- 
what like  my  friends  in  the  literary  world,  or  like 
some  of  them  at  least,  who  were  unable  to  understand 
why  I  should  not  continue  indefinitely  to  run  for 
mayor,  though  the  politicians  were  not  so  innocent 
and  credulous,   since   they   did   not   believe  that  I 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

could  as  inevitably  continue  to  be  elected.  I  sup- 
pose it  was  the  life  of  action  that  appealed  to  my 
literary  friends  or  to  their  literary  imaginations ; 
they  had  the  human  habit  of  disparaging  their  own 
calling,  and,  if  they  did  not  hold  my  performance 
in  that  field  as  lightly  as  the  politicians  held  it,  they 
wondered  why  I  did  not  prefer  politics.  The  poli- 
ticians in  their  harangues  spoke  of  my  writings  bit- 
terly, as  though  they  were  a  personal  affront  to 
their  intelligences,  and  urged  the  electorate  to  re- 
buke me  for  spending  my  time  upon  such  nonsense. 
If  I  had  not  known  that  they  had  never  read  my 
books,  or  any  books,  all  this  might  have  been  chilling 
to  the  literary  aspiration,  but  I  knew  them  to  their 
heart's  core,  where  there  was  nothing  but  contempt 
for  books,  and,  as  I  sometimes  thought,  yielding  too 
much  to  cynicism  and  despair,  nothing  but  contempt 
for  any  sort  of  beauty  or  goodly  impulse.  Of 
course,  they  were  not  so  bad  as  that ;  out  of  politics 
they  were  as  good  as  anyone  or  as  anything;  we 
instinctively  recognize  the  vitiating  quality  of  the 
political  atmosphere  in  our  constant  use  of  the 
phrase  "if  it  could  only  be  taken  out  of  politics," 
as  with  the  tariff,  the  currency,  municipal  govern- 
ment, etc.  But  my  friends  in  the  political  line  could 
join  my  friends  in  the  literary  line  in  the  surprise 
they  felt  at  my  decision  to  retire  at  the  end  of  that 
last  term.  The  politicians  did  not  think  I  meant 
what  I  said,  of  course;  it  is  quite  impossible  for  a 
politician  to  imagine  a  man's  meaning  what  he  says, 
since  politicians  so  seldom  mean  what  they  say  them- 
selves; they  considered  it  merely  as  bad  politics  to 

349 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

have  said  such  a  thing  at  all.  "It'll  embarrass  you 
when  you  run  again,"  they  would  warn  me  in  their 
bland  naivete.  It  did  not  embarrass  me,  however, 
because  I  would  not  and  did  not  run  again,  though  I 
had  to  decline  a  nomination  or  two  before  they  were 
convinced,  but  their  own  lack  of  faith,  those  who 
were  still  Independents,  at  least,  proved  an  ultimate 
embarrassment  to  them,  for  they  neglected  to  agree 
upon  a  candidate  to  succeed  me,  and  by  the  next 
election  they  had  grouped  themselves  in  factions, 
each  with  its  own  candidate.  Perhaps  this  untoward 
result  came  to  pass  as  much  because  the  independent 
movement  by  that  time  had  become  the  Independent 
party,  as  for  any  other  reason  discernible  to  the 
mind  of  man ;  at  least,  it  was  disparaged  by  the  use 
of  that  term,  which  implied  its  own  reproach  in 
Toledo,  and  its  sponsors  conducted  themselves  so 
much  after  the  historic  precedents  of  faction  in  po- 
litical parties,  by  separating  into  the  inevitable  right 
and  left  wing,  that  they  managed  to  get  themselves 
soundly  beaten. 

Eight  years  is  a  long  time  to  serve  in  any  office. 
My  grandfather  had  given  four  years  to  the  Civil 
War,  and  I  had  found  the  mayor's  office  as  trying, 
as  difficult,  and  as  alien  as  he  had  found  his  martial 
experience.  The  truth  is,  that  long  before  the  eight 
years  were  over  the  irritation  of  constant,  persistent, 
nagging  criticism  had  got  on  my  nerves,  and,  besides 
the  pain  of  misunderstanding  and  misrepresentation, 
I  grew  to  have  a  perfect  detestation  for  those 
manipulations  which  are  the  technic  of  politics. 
And,     then,     one     cannot     be     a     mayor     always, 

350 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

and  it  were  better  to  retire  than  to  be  dismissed. 

"But  I  thought  you  didn't  mind  criticism!"  a 
man  said  to  me  one  day.  "I  always  supposed  that 
after  a  while  one  became  callous." 

My  dear  friend  Bishop  Williams  of  Detroit  was 
at  the  table,  and  I  shall  ever  be  grateful  to  him  for 
the  smile  of  instant  comprehension  and  sympathy 
with  which  he  illuminated  the  reply  he  made  before 
I  had  time  to  speak. 

"Yes,  callous,"  he  remarked,  "or — raw." 

It  was  precisely  that.  There  were  those  who  were 
always  saying  to  me:  "I  know  you  don't  mind  what 
they  say  about  you,  but  I  never  could  stand  it ;  I'm 
too  sensitive."  It  was  a  daily  experience,  almost  as 
difficult  to  endure  as  the  visits  of  those  who  came  to 
report  the  latest  ill-natured  comment;  they  did  it 
because  they  were  friends  and  felt  that  I  should  know 
it.  But  Bishop  Williams  knows  life  and  understands 
human  nature  more  completely  and  more  tolerantly 
than  any  clergyman  I  ever  knew. 

And  then  politics  have  the  dreadful  effect  of  beat- 
ing all  the  freshness  out  of  a  man;  if  they  do  not 
make  him  timid,  they  make  him  hesitant  and  cau- 
tious, provident  of  his  opinion;  he  goes  about  with 
his  finger  on  his  lips,  fearful  of  utterance,  and,  when 
he  does  speak,  it  is  in  guarded  syllables  which  con- 
ceal his  true  thought;  he  cultivates  solemnity  and 
the  meretricious  art  of  posing;  humor  is  to  be 
avoided,  since  the  crowd  is  perplexed  by  humor  and 
so  resents  it,  and  will  have  only  the  stale  rudimen- 
tary wit  of  those  stories  which  men,  straining  to  be 
funny,  match  at  the  banquet  board.     And  when  he 

351 


FORTY   YEARS    OF   IT 

indulges  himself  in  public  speech  it  is  to  pour  forth 
a  tide  of  words, 

Full  of  sound  and  fury, 
Signifying  nothing. 

I  used  to  be  haunted  continually  by  a  horrid  fear 
that  I  should  lose  the  possibility  of  ever  winning  the 
power  of  utterance,  since  no  such  prudence  is  at  all 
compatible  with  the  practice  of  any  art.  For  art 
must,  first  of  all,  be  utter  sincerity,  the  artist's  busi- 
ness is  to  think  out  his  thoughts  about  life  to  the 
very  end,  and  to  speak  them  as  plainly  as  the  power 
and  the  ability  to  speak  them  have  been  given  to 
him;  he  must  not  be  afraid  to  offend;  indeed,  if  he 
succeed  at  all,  he  must  certainly  offend  in  the  be- 
ginning. I  am  quite  aware  that  I  may  seem  incon- 
sistent in  this  notion,  since  I  have  intimated  my  be- 
lief that  Jones  was  an  artist;  and  so  he  was,  in  a 
way,  and,  if  I  do  not  fly  to  the  refuge  of  trite  say- 
ings and  allege  him  as  the  exception  that  proves  the 
rule,  I  am  sure  that  I  may  say,  and,  if  I  have  in  the 
least  been  able  to  convey  any  distinct  conception  of 
his  personality,  the  reader  will  agree  with  me  when 
I  say,  that  he  was  sui  generis.  And  besides  it  was 
not  as  a  politician  that  he  won  his  success.  Had  he 
ventured  outside  the  political  jurisdiction  of  his  own 
city  the  politicians  instantly  would  have  torn  him 
asunder  because  he  had  not  been  "regular."  And, 
that,  I  find,  when  I  set  it  down,  is  precisely  what  I 
am  trying  to  say  about  the  artist;  he  must  not  be 
regular.  Every  great  artist  in  the  world  has  been 
irregular,  as  irregular  as  Corot,  going  forth  in  the 

352 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

early  morning  in  search  of  the  elusive  and  ineffable 
light  of  dawn  as  it  spread  over  the  earth  and  stole 
through  the  greenwoods  at  Barbizon,  or  as  Manet, 
or  Monet,  or  any  other  man  who  never  knew  appre- 
ciation in  his  lifetime.  And  Jones  and  all  like  him 
are  brothers  of  those  incomparable  artists ;  they  are 
not  kin  in  any  way  to  the  world's  politicians. 

And  then  so  many  of  the  old  guard  were  dead. 
A  strange  and  tragic  fate  had  pursued  us,  overtak- 
ing, one  after  another,  our  very  best — Jones,  first 
of  all,  and  then  Oren  Dunham,  E.  B.  Southard,  Dad 
McCullough,  Franklin  Macomber,  Lyman  Wachen- 
heimer,  Dr.  Donnelly,  William  H.  Maher.  These 
brave,  true  souls  were  literally  burned  out  in  the 
fires  of  that  fierce  and  relentless  conflict,  and  then 
there  came  that  soft  autumn  night  when  seven  of 
our  young  men  in  a  launch  were  run  down  by  a 
freighter  on  Maumee  Bay  and  drowned,  every  one 
of  them. 

I  shall  never  forget  Johnson  Thurston  as  he  sat 
in  my  office  during  that  last  campaign,  recalling 
these  men  who  had  been  to  him  as  comrades  in  arms, 
and,  what  affected  him  more  sorely,  the  fact  that  in 
our  overabundant  political  success  the  ideals  that 
had  beckoned  them  on  had  become  blurred  in  the 
vision  of  those  who  came  after  them.  I  detected 
him  in  the  act  of  drawing  his  handkerchief  furtively 
from  his  pocket,  and  hastily  pressing  it  to  his  eyes, 
as  he  stammered  something  in  apology  for  his  emo- 
tion.    .     .     . 

Thus  there  came  the  irresistible  conviction  that 
the  work  of  the  politician  was  not  for  me.     There 

353 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

was  other  work  I  wished  to  do.  I  doubt  whether 
the  politician's  work  is  ever  permanent,  though  it 
is  too  much  to  say  that  it  lacks  real  value;  I  have 
never  been  able  to  think  it  out.  The  work  of  few 
men,  of  course,  is  permanent,  sometimes  the  work  of 
the  artist  least  of  any.  But,  however  ephemeral,  if 
the  artist's  work  is  done  in  sincerity,  it  is  of  far 
greater  worth  than  the  work  of  the  politician,  if  for 
no  other  reason,  than  because,  to  recall  again  those 
words  of  George  Moore  which  can  never  lose  their 
charm  or  their  consolation,  the  traffic  of  the  politi- 
cian is  with  the  affairs  of  this  world,  while  the  artist 
is  concerned  with  the  dreams,  the  visions,  and  the  as- 
pirations of  a  world  that  is  beyond  this.  I  have 
quoted  them  before  in  these  pages,  I  know ;  they  can- 
not be  quoted  too  often,  or  too  often  read  by  us 
Americans,  if,  by  pondering  them,  we  may  plumb 
their  profound  depths.  For  we  all  read  human  his- 
tory too  superficially.  Kings  and  emperors,  princes 
and  dukes,  prime  ministers  and  generals  may  fasci- 
nate the  imagination  for  a  while,  but  if  life  is  ever  to 
unfold  its  possibilities  to  the  later  consciousness, 
these  become  but  the  phantoms  of  vanished  realms, 
and  there  emerge  more  gracious  figures,  Phidias  and 
Theocritus;  Dante,  Petrarch,  and  Boccaccio;  Ra- 
phael, Leonardo  da  Vinci,  Titian,  and  Correggio; 
Donatello  and  Michelangelo;  Sidney,  Spenser,  Tyn- 
dale,  Shakespeare,  and  Ben  Jonson.  These  and 
the  other  artists  and  humanists  of  their  times  are 
veritable  personalities  in  our  world,  far  more  than 
Elizabeth,  or  the  dukes  of  the  Medici,  or  even  Peri- 
cles.    For  from  periods  such  as  these  their  names 

354 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

made  illustrious,  from  the  Revival  of  Learning,  the 
Renaissance,  the  Reformation,  man  emerged  as  Man, 
clothed  with  the  beauty  and  power  of  an  emancipated 
spirit.  In  the  freedom  of  the  mind,  the  spontaneous 
outburst  of  ecstasy  and  delight,  the  new-born  possi- 
bility of  loveliness  and  harmony  and  joyous  exist- 
ence, they  not  only  exalted  life  with  art,  but  gained 
the  courage  to  undertake  sterner  examinations  of  its 
mystery.  And  this  same  perennial  spirit  of  human- 
ism built,  not  only  the  proud  and  voluptuous  cities 
of  Tuscany  and  Lombardy,  but  the  wealthy  free 
cities  of  Flanders  and  Germany — and  it  discovered 
America,  not  the  America  of  the  senses  alone,  but 
the  larger,  nobler  America  of  the  mind. 

And,  surely,  this  America  is  not  always  to  bear 
the  reproach  of  having  no  music,  and  so  little  paint- 
ing and  literature  of  her  own.  Surely  the  aspira- 
tions of  this  new  land,  with  the  irresistible  impulse 
of  the  democratic  spirit  and  humanistic  culture  are 
to  find  emotional  expression  in  the  terms  and  forms 
of  enduring  beauty.  It  was  this  sublime  adventure 
that  interested  me  far  more  than  the  trivial  and 
repulsive  wrangles  of  the  politicians.     .     .     . 

Our  opponents  had  never  known  how  wholly  right 
they  were  in  their  reiterated  charge  that  I  was  but 
a  dreamer ;  incorrigible  dreamer  indeed,  and  nothing 
more! 

But  in  these  years  I  had  given  my  city  the  best 
there  was  in  me,  little  as  that  was,  and  when  the 
legislature  made  provision  for  the  constitutional  con- 
vention, which  met  at  Columbus,  and,  after  months 
of  deliberation,  submitted  a  long  list  of  amendments 

355 


FORTY   YEARS    OF   IT 

to  the  fundamental  law  of  the  state,  among  them 
that  one  which  granted  home  rule  to  cities,  I  felt, 
for  it  was  an  emotion  deeper  than  thought,  that  if 
the  people  could  only  be  induced  to  approve  that 
amendment  the  long  anticipated  and  happy  release 
was  at  hand.  We  had  been  engaged  on  an  impossible 
task;  we  had  been  trying  to  regenerate  the  city  by 
means  of  electing  to  office  persons  who  in  themselves 
would  reflect  the  communal  aspiration,  but  this  could 
not  be  continued  indefinitely ;  the  cities  could  achieve 
no  genuine  reform  until  they  were  autonomous. 
With  home  rule  democracy  would  have  the  means  of 
development,  and  the  people  the  opportunity  of  self- 
expression;  they  would  have  to  depend  on  them- 
selves ;  they  could  no  longer,  with  an  Oriental  fatal- 
ism, neglect  their  own  destiny  and  then  lay  the  blame 
for  the  inevitable  catastrophe  on  the  mayor,  or  the 
political  boss,  or  the  country  members  of  the  legisla- 
ture.       .    ' 

There  were,  if  I  remember  well,  about  fifty  of 
these  amendments,  among  them  provisions  for  the 
initiative  and  referendum,  woman  suffrage,  and 
many  other  progressive  and  radical  doctrines,  in 
addition  to  our  beloved  home  rule  for  cities,  and, 
when  the  campaign  opened  in  behalf  of  their  adop- 
tion, Newton  Baker,  who  a  year  before  had  been 
elected  mayor  of  Cleveland,  proposed  that  he  and 
I  make  a  tour  of  the  state  in  a  motor  car  and  speak 
for  the  home  rule  amendment,  since  all  the  others 
had  their  devoted  proponents. 

Nothing  more  delightful  than  a  campaign  tour  in 
company  with  Newton  Baker  could  be  imagined,  and 

356 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

I  had  visions  of  our  little  caravan,  out  on  the  coun- 
try roads  of  Ohio,  going  from  town  to  town,  and  of 
our  standing  up  in  the  car  and  speaking  to  the  crowds 
of  farmers  who  had  come  into  the  town  to  hear 
us,  or  having  come  for  their  Saturday  marketing, 
would  pause  while  we  told  them  of  the  needs  of  cities. 
I  had  always  believed  that  if  the  farmers  could  only 
be  brought  to  understand  the  cities  they  would  not 
be  so  obdurate  with  us,  but  would  enlarge  our  oppor- 
tunities of  self-expression  and  self-government.  I 
could  fancy  myself  standing  up  and  leaning  over 
the  side  of  the  car  and  talking  to  them,  while  they 
stood  there  in  their  drab  garments,  their  faces  drawn 
in  mental  concentration,  looking  at  us  out  of  eyes 
around  which  were  little  wrinkles  of  suspicion, 
wondering  what  designs  we  had  upon  them;  at 
first  they  would  stand  afar  off,  perhaps  on  the 
other  side  of  the  street,  as  they  used  to  do  when 
we  went  out  to  speak  to  them  in  the  judicial 
campaigns;  but  then  presently  they  would  draw 
a  little  closer,  until  at  last  they  crowded  about 
the  car,  staying  on  to  the  end,  and  then  perhaps 
even  vouchsafing  us  the  conservative  approval  of 
scattered  applause.  Or  I  would  dramatize  Baker  as 
speaking,  while  I  sat  there  utterly  charmed  with  his 
manner,  his  clear  and  polished  expression,  and  en- 
vied him  his  ability  to  speak  with  such  surprising 
fluency,  such  ease  and  grace,  as  if  the  fact  of  putting 
words  together  so  that  they  would  form  clear,  logi- 
cal and  related  sentences  were  nothing  at  all,  and 
wondering  why  it  was  that  every  one  that  heard  was 
not  instantly   converted   to   his   plan,   whatever  it 

357 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

was.  .  .  .  And  then,  between  times,  Baker 
would  not  be  talking  politics  at  all ;  he  would  not  be 
indulging  in  politician's  low  gossip,  slandering  every 
one  he  knew — the  ineradicable  and,  I  suppose,  in- 
evitable habit  of  politicians,  because  in  public  they 
are  obliged  to  be  so  suave  in  utterance  and  so  smil- 
ing and  ingratiating  in  manner.  Baker  was  not  like 
them  at  all;  he  knew  a  vast  deal  of  literature  and 
could  talk  about  books  with  comprehension;  if  you 
mentioned  a  passage  from  John  Eglinton,  or  a  scene 
from  Tourgenieff,  or  a  poem  of  Yeats  or  Masefield, 
he  would  know  what  you  were  talking  about ;  he  is  not 
one  of  those  who,  by  the  little  deceit  of  a  thin,  facti- 
tious smile  of  appreciation,  pretend  an  acquaintance 
they  have  never  enjoyed.  Baker  has  been  able  to 
keep  the  habit  of  reading,  even  in  politics,  a  singular 
achievement.  Only  he  would  not  read  novels  that 
were  in  the  somber  or  tragic  manner;  I  used  to  tell 
him  that  this  was  a  sign  he  was  growing  old,  since 
only  the  buoyancy  of  youth  can  risk  its  spirit  in  such 
darkened  paths.  For  instance,  he  would  never  read 
my  novel  about  prisons,  "The  Turn  of  the  Balance" ; 
he  said  he  knew  it  was  too  terrible.  But  I  did  not 
reproach  or  blame  him.  I  no  longer  like  to  read 
terrible  books  myself,  since  life  is     .     .     . 

But  that  pretty  scheme  fell  through,  our  tour 
was  abandoned,  and  we  went  separate  ways,  though 
we  did  have  the  joy  of  speaking  together  on  several 
occasions,  once  here  in  Toledo,  where  we  opened  the 
campaign  in  old  Memorial  Hall,  and  again  in  a  town 
down  the  state,  and  at  last  in  two  great  meetings  in 
Cleveland,  where  they  got  out  the  old  tent  Johnson 

358 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

had  used  In  his  campaigns,  and  the  audiences  its 
canvas  walls  sheltered,  there  under  the  flaring 
torches,  were  inspired  by  his  spirit  as  once  they 
had  been  by  his  presence,  and  with  the  enthusi- 
asm of  them  fresh  in  my  heart  I  set  out  from 
Cleveland  that  last  week  of  the  campaign  for  the 
long  drive  to  Columbus,  where  the  campaign  was  to 
close. 

It  was  a  hot  day  in  early  September;  the  clouds 
were  piled  high  in  the  west  as  we  started,  and  the 
air  was  suffocating  in  its  dense  humidity ;  plainly  it 
was  to  be  a  day  of  thunder  and  lightning  and  tropi- 
cal showers.  My  friend,  Henry  W.  Ashley,  who 
understands  democracy  to  the  fundamentals  (his 
father  was  the  friend  of  Lincoln  and  wrote  the 
Fifteenth  Amendment),  was  with  us,  for  he  was  ever 
an  interested  spectator  of  our  politics.  We  went 
by  the  way  of  Oberlin  because  Ashley  wished  to  see 
the  college  campus  and  indulge  some  sentimental  re- 
flections in  a  scene  that  had  been  so  vitally  asso- 
ciated with  the  old  struggle  of  the  abolitionists.  The 
storm  which  had  been  so  ominously  threatening  all 
the  morning  broke  upon  us  as  we  slowly  made  our 
way  through  the  country  south  of  Oberlin,  as  deso- 
late a  tract  as  one  could  find,  and  we  were  charged 
as  heavily  with  depression  as  were  the  clouds  with 
rain  as  we  thought  of  the  futility  of  attempting  to 
convince  the  inhabitants  of  such  a  land  that  they 
had  any  responsibility  for  the  problems  that  were 
vexing  the  people  in  the  cities  of  the  state.  I  remem- 
ber a  village  through  which  we  passed;  it  was  about 
noon,  according  to  our  watches,  though,  since  in  the 

359 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

country  the  people  reject  Standard  time  and  regu- 
late their  leisurely  affairs  by  "God's  time,"  noon 
was  half  an  hour  gone,  and,  after  their  dinners,  they 
were  seeking  the  relaxation  they  did  not  seem  to  need. 
The  rain  had  ceased,  and  on  the  village  green  under 
the  clearing  sky  the  old  men  had  come  out  to  pitch 
horseshoes.  Among  them  was  a  patriarch  whose 
long  white  beard,  stained  with  the  juice  of  the  to- 
bacco he  resolutely  chewed,  swept  the  belt  of  his 
slack  trousers ;  he  was  in  bare  feet.  The  human 
foot  after  it  has  trod  this  earth  for  three  score  years 
and  ten  is  not  a  thing  of  beauty,  and  Ashley  joked 
me,  as  we  labored  in  the  mud  of  those  deplorable 
roads,  for  my  temerity  in  hoping  that  we  could  con- 
vert that  antediluvian  to  our  way  of  thinking. 

Had  the  task  been  wholly  mine  I  should  not  have 
undertaken  it,  and,  of  course,  in  that  instance  I  did 
not  attempt  it;  the  old  barefoot  quoit  player  stood 
to  us  a  symbol  of  the  implicit  and  stubborn  con- 
servatism of  the  rural  districts.  But  there  were 
others  in  the  field,  an  army  of  them,  indeed ;  Herbert 
Bigelow,  the  radical  preacher  of  Cincinnati,  who  had 
been  president  of  the  constitutional  convention; 
Henry  T.  Hunt,  Cincinnati's  young  mayor;  and, 
most  influential  of  all  of  them  perhaps,  James  M. 
Cox,  destined  that  autumn  to  be  elected  governor  of 
Ohio.  And,  besides  all  these,  there  was  the  spirit 
of  the  times,  penetrating  at  last  with  its  inspiring 
ideas  even  the  conservatism  of  the  country  people.  I 
was  confident  that  the  old  man  could  be  counted 
upon  to  vote  for  the  initiative  and  referendum  at 
any  rate,  since  one  so  free  and  democratic  in  cos- 

360 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

tume  and  manner  must  be  of  the  democratic  spirit 
as  well,  though  I  had  my  doubts  of  him  in  that  mo- 
ment when  he  should  put  on  his  spectacles  and  ex- 
amine the  amendments  abolishing  capital  punish- 
ment, and  granting  home  rule  to  cities. 

But  the  sun  came  out  again  as  we  climbed  the  hills 
that  overlook  Mansfield,  to  command  a  lovely  scene, 
broad  fertile  valleys  all  renewed  by  the  rain  and 
flooded  with  sunshine,  and  I  remembered  that  Alt- 
geld  had  once  lived  there,  and  beheld  this  same  land- 
scape, that  he  had  taught  school  in  that  town  and 
from  there  had  gone  away  with  a  regiment  to  fight 
in  the  Civil  War.  The  chauffeur  got  out  and  took 
the  chains  off  the  tires,  while  we  sat  silent  under  the 
influences  of  the  beauty  of  those  little  Ohio  hills. 
And  then,  as  we  started  on,  the  clouds  returned,  the 
scene  darkened,  and  it  began  to  rain  again,  and,  be- 
fore we  knew,  the  car  skidded  and  we  were  in  the 
ditch.  The  wife  of  the  farmer  whose  garden  fence 
we  had  broken  in  our  accident  revealed  all  the  old 
rural  dislike  of  the  urbanite;  she  said  she  was  glad 
of  our  fate,  since  motorists  were  forever  racing  by 
and  killing  her  chickens,  and  with  this  difficulty  I  left 
Ashley  to  deal,  since  he  had  been  president  of  a  rail- 
road and  was  experienced  in  adjusting  claims,  and, 
after  he  had  parleyed  a  while,  I  saw  him  take  out  his 
pocketbook,  and  then  the  chauffeur  got  the  car  out 
of  the  ditch  and  we  were  on  our  way  again. 

The  scenes  and  the  experiences  of  that  journey 
remain  with  me  in  a  distinctness  that  is  keen  in  my 
senses  still ;  because  I  suppose  I  felt  that  in  the  race 
with  time  we  were  then  engaged  upon,  if  we  were  to 

361 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

reach  Columbus  that  evening  for  the  meeting  which 
was  to  close  the  campaign,  I  was  in  a  symbolic  man- 
ner racing  with  my  own  fate ;  that  campaign  a  suc- 
cess and  I  should  be  free.  I  should  have  liked  to  lin- 
ger a  while  in  Delaware,  where  I  had  spent  a  portion 
of  my  boyhood  when  my  father  was  a  pastor  there, 
and  where  in  the  University  my  uncle  William  F. 
Whitlock  had  been  a  professor  of  Latin  and  litera- 
ture for  half  a  century,  dean  of  the  faculty,  and,  for 
a  while,  president.  As  we  passed  by  the  chapel  in 
the  shade  of  the  old  elms  on  the  campus  I  felt  that  I 
could  still  hear  the  solemn  strains  of  the  noble  hymn 
they  sang  at  his  funeral,  the  lusty  young  voices  of  a 
thousand  students,  united  with  the  quivering  trebles 
of  some  old  clergymen,  in  "Faith  of  Our  Fathers, 
Living  Still." 

My  eyes  could  pierce  the  walls  of  the  chapel, 
closed  and  silent  that  afternoon  for  the  autumn  term 
had  not  opened,  and  I  could  see  myself  sitting  there 
in  the  pew  with  our  family,  and  looking  at  the  por- 
trait in  oil  of  my  uncle  on  the  wall,  among  the  por- 
traits of  the  other  presidents  of  the  University, 
faintly  adumbrating  on  his  great  smoothly  shaven 
face  the  smile  of  quizzical  humor  which  he  wears  in 
my  memory.    I  sat  there, 

by  these  tears  a  little  boy  again, 

and  thought  of  those  days  so  long  before  when  at 
evening  he  would  come  to  our  house  and  stand 
spreading  his  hands  before  the  fire  for  a  while;  he 
generally  brought  under  his  arm  a  book  for  my 
father  to  read.    I  remembered  that  he  used  to  carry 

362 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

papers  in  his  high  hat,  and  that  his  coat  stood  away 
from  his  neck,  round  which  he  wore  a  low  standing 
collar,  with  a  black  cravat.  He  seemed  to  carry  in 
the  pocket  of  his  waistcoat  an  endless  succession  of 
eyeglasses ;  he  would  use  a  pair,  take  them  down 
from  his  high  nose,  lay  them  on  the  table,  forget 
them,  and,  when  he  wished  to  read  again,  draw 
another  pair  from  his  waistcoat  pocket.  And  I 
went  on  thinking  of  him  as  he  looked  over  his  glasses 
on  that  evening  when  I  had  gone  late  into  his  study 
and  found  him  bent  over  his  desk  with  the  "Satires" 
of  Juvenal  before  him,  studying  his  lesson  for  the 
morrow,  he  said.  I  thought  he  knew  all  the  Latin 
there  was  left  in  this  world,  but,  "Oh,  no,"  he  said, 
and  added:    "If  you  would  sometimes  study  at  this 

hour  of  the  night  perhaps "  He  did  not  finish  his 

sentence,  since  it  finished  itself.  ...  "I  don't 
exactly  know  how  to  render  that  passage,  Profes- 
sor," a  student,  blundering  through  an  unmastered 
lesson,  said  in  conciliatory  accents  one  morning. 
"Ah,  that  has  been  evident  for  some  time,"  my  uncle 
replied.  .  .  .  And  now  there  he  lay  in  his  coffin, 
on  the  spot  in  that  dim  chapel  where  he  had  so  often 
stood  up  to  address  the  students ;  he  was  gone  with 
all  those  others  whose  portraits  hung  on  the  wall, 
men  who  had  stood  to  me  in  my  boyhood  as  the  great 
figures  of  the  world.  I  should  see  him  walking  under 
those  trees  no  more,  his  tall  form  stooped  in  habitual 
meditation.  .  .  .  They  were  all  big,  those  Whit- 
lock  forbears  of  mine,  six  feet  tall  every  one  of  them, 
grim  Puritans,  I  think,  when  they  first  came  to  this 
country  three  centuries  ago.     .     .     .     And  I  had 

363 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

a  vision  of  my  uncle  as  walking  that  afternoon  in 
other  groves  with  all  these  dark  ministerial  figures 
that  towered  over  my  boyhood.  They  were  all  Puri- 
tans, too,  strong  and  rugged  men,  inflexible,  obdur- 
ate, much  enduring,  stern  pioneers  whose  like  is 
known  no  more.  And  I,  who  could  join  in 
the  lofty  strains  of  that  old  hymn,  as  a  memo- 
rial to  my  uncle,  could  find  unavailing  regret 
in  my  reverence.  .  .  .  But  all  changes,  and 
it  was  a  time  of  change,  one  of  those  periods 
which  make  up  the  whelming  tragedy  of  this  life. 
And,  as  they  had  gone,  so  all  the  old  combina- 
tions had  disappeared  with  them,  resolved  into  the 
elements  that  make  up  that  shadowy  vale  we  call 
the  past.  .  .  .  But  we  were  driving  on,  racing 
away  from  that  past  as  fast  as  we  could  go,  on  by 
the  cemetery  where  my  uncle  lies  in  his  grave,  on 
by  the  rocky  ledges  of  the  Olentangy,  the  little 
stream  where  we  boys  used  to  swim,  and,  just  as 
darkness  was  falling,  besmattered  with  mud,  we 
drove  into  Columbus,  and  along  High  Street,  hideous 
in  the  crazy  decorations  that  were  hung  out  in  honor 
of  the  State  Fair,  and  up  to  the  Neil  House — and 
across  the  street  on  the  steps  of  the  old  state  house 
four  or  five  thousand  people  already  gathered  for 
the  meeting  at  which  I  was  to  be  the  only  speaker. 
A  bath  and  a  bite  of  supper,  and  then  across  the 
street  to  the  meeting,  and  I  was  standing  there  be- 
fore that  vast  crowd,  and  over  us  the  shadowy  mass 
of  the  old  capitol,  in  which  my  grandfather  had  made 
the  first  motion  that  was  ever  put  in  it  as  a  member 
of  the  senate  half  a  century  before ;  he  told  me  that 

364 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

his  two  sons  danced  all  night  at  the  ball  with  which 
its  opening  was  celebrated. 

And  so,  on  that  brilliant  Sunday  morning  in  Sep- 
tember, as  we  entered  the  motor  car  in  Columbus, 
with  the  impressions  of  the  great  meeting  of  that 
Saturday  night  still  fresh  and  vivid  in  the  mind,  I 
could  settle  myself  for  the  long  drive  back  to  Toledo 
over  the  white  pikes  that  wound  northward  between 
the  fair  fields  of  our  beautiful  Ohio,  and  say  to  my- 
self, over  and  over,  with  the  delicious  sensations  of 
a  secret,  that  the  relief  had  almost  come  at  last,  and 
that  now  I  could  do  the  thing  I  loved  to  do — if  only 
the  people  would  approve  the  constitutional  amend- 
ments at  the  election  on  Tuesday.  There  were  the 
happiest  of  auguries  in  the  sky;  it  was  without  a 
cloud  to  fleck  its  blue  expanse,  and  the  sun  blazed 
and  its  light  sparkled  in  the  fresh  air,  and  as  we 
rode  the  fields  swept  by,  the  pastures  still  green,  the 
ripening  corn  tall  in  maturity,  nodding  its  heavy 
tassels  and  waving  its  broad  leaves  of  dark  green, 
the  mown  fields  yellow  with  their  stubble,  and  the 
wide  land,  somnolent  and  heavy  with  fecundity,  al- 
ready rich  with  the  gold  of  autumn. 

And  the  people  did  approve,  with  vast  majorities, 
and  among  all  the  principles  of  democracy  they 
wrote  in  their  fundamental  law  that  day  was  that  of 
municipal  home  rule,  so  that  all  those  cities,  un- 
dreamed of  when  the  old  constitution  had  been  writ- 
ten, and  all  those  little  towns,  silent  and  sleepy  in  the 
drowse  of  that  Sunday  afternoon,  might  own  and 
operate  their  public  utilities,  might  draft  their  own 
charters,    have    what    form    of    government    they 

365 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

pleased,  in  short,  become  free.     And  so  the  great 
dream  of  Johnson  and  of  Jones  came  true  at  last. 


LXIII 

It  was  of  the  Free  City  they  had  dreamed  and 
that  they  had  not  lived  to  behold  the  fulfillment  of 
their  dream  was,  in  its  way,  the  final  certification 
of  the  validity  of  their  services  as  pioneers.  It  is  an 
old  rule  of  life,  or  an  old  trick  of  the  fates  that 
seem  so  casually  to  govern  life,  that  the  dreams  of 
mortals  are  seldom  destined  to  come  true,  though 
mortals  sometimes  thwart  the  fates  by  finding  their 
dreams  in  themselves  sufficient.  In  this  sense  Jones 
and  Johnson  had  already  been  rewarded.  It  had 
been  a  dream  of  wonder  and  of  beauty,  the  vision 
of  a  city  stately  with  towers,  above  which  there 
hung  the  glow  which  poor  Jude  used  to  see  at  even- 
ing when  he  climbed  to  the  roof  of  the  Brown  House 
on  the  ridgeway  near  Marygreen.  It  was  a  city 
in  which  there  were  the  living  conceptions  of  justice, 
pity,  mercy,  consideration,  toleration,  beauty,  art, 
all  those  graces  which  mankind  so  long  has  held 
noblest  and  most  dear.  It  was  a  city  wherein  hu- 
man life  was  precious,  and  therefore  gracious,  a 
city  which  the  citizen  loved  as  a  graduate  loves  his 
alma  mater,  a  city  with  a  communal  spirit.  There 
the  old  ideas  of  privilege  had  given  way  to  the 
ideals  of  service,  public  property  was  held  as  sacred 
as  private  property,  power  was  lightly  wielded,  the 
people's  voice  was  intelligent  and  omnipotent,  for 

S66 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

they  had  learned  the  wisdom  that  confuses  dema- 
gogues, and  amid  the  interplay  of  myriad  forces,  the 
democratic  spirit  was  ever  at  work,  performing  its 
noble  functions.  You  might  have  said  that  the 
people  were  inspired,  since  they  united  so  readily  in 
great  constructive  work,  reducing  to  order  and  sci- 
entific arrangement  all  the  manifold  needs  and  ex- 
pressions of  the  daily  life,  conquering  in  the  old 
struggle  against  nature,  providing  against  all  that 
casualty  and  accident  which  make  life  to-day  such 
a  snarl  of  squalid  tragedies  and  ridiculous  comedies 
that  it  well  may  seem  to  be  ruled  by  none  other  than 
the  most  whimsical  and  spiteful  of  irresponsible 
spirits.  It  was  more  than  a  city  indeed,  it  was  a 
realm  of  reason,  wherein  the  people  at  last  in  good 
will  were  living  a  social  life.  The  eternal  negative, 
the  everlasting  no,  had  given  way  to  a  new  affirma- 
tion; each  morning  should  ordain  new  emancipa- 
tions, and  each  evening  behold  new  reconciliations 
among  men.  It  was  a  city  wherein  the  people  were 
achieving  more  and  more  of  leisure,  that  life  in  all 
her  splendor  and  her  beauty  and  her  glory  might  not 
pass  by  unhailed,  unrecognized  even,  by  so  many 
toiling  thousands.  It  was  the  vision  of  a  city  set 
upon  a  hill,  with  happy  people  singing  in  the  streets. 
These  words  I  know  but  vaguely  express  the 
vision  that  had  come  to  those  two  men  with  the 
unpoetic  names  of  Johnson  and  Jones.  When  I 
speak  of  a  city  where  people  sing  in  the  streets  I 
am  perfectly  well  aware  of  the  smile  that  touches 
the  lips  of  sophistication,  though  the  smile  would 
have  been  none  the  less   cynical  had  I  mentioned 

367 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

merely  a  city  in  which  there  were  happy  people  at 
all.  I  am  perfectly  well  aware  that  such  a  thing 
in  all  literalness  is  perhaps  impossible  to  the  weary, 
preoccupied  crowds  in  the  streets  of  any  of  our 
cities;  it  would  be  too  absurd,  too  ridiculous,  and 
probably  against  the  law,  if  not  indeed  quite  wicked. 
In  Mr.  Housman's  somber  lines : 

These  are  not  in  plight  to  bear, 

If  they  would,  another's  care. 

They  have  enough  as  'tis:     I  see 

In  many  an  eye  that  measures  me 

The  mortal  sickness  of  a  mind 

Too  unhappy  to  be  kind. 

Undone  with  misery,  all  they  can 

Is  to  hate  their  fellow  man; 

And  till  they  drop  they  needs  must  still 

Look  at  you  and  wish  you  ill. 

And  yet,  it  is  not  wholly  impossible  after  all. 
One  evening  in  Brussels,  hearing  the  strains  of  a 
band  I  looked  out  of  my  hotel  window,  and  saw  a 
throng  of  youth  and  maidens  dancing  in  a  mist 
of  rain  down  an  asphalt  pavement  that  glistened 
under  the  electric  lights.  It  was  a  sight  of  such 
innocence,  of  such  simple  joy  and  gayety  as  one 
could  never  behold  in  our  cities,  and  it  occasioned 
no  more  remark,  was  considered  no  more  out  of 
place  or  unbecoming  than  it  would  be  for  a  man  to 
sprawl  on  one  of  our  sidewalks  and  look  for  a  dime 
he  had  dropped.  But  I  happened  to  use  that  phrase 
about  singing  in  the  streets  simply  because  it  was 
one  Jones  used  to  employ,  just  as  Johnson  used 

368 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

forever  to  be  talking  about  his  city  set  on  a  hill.  If 
Johnson's  phrase  was  in  an  old  poetic  strain  Jones 
meant  literally  what  he  said.  He  used  to  talk  of 
the  crowds  he  had  seen  along  the  boulevards  of 
Paris,  and  the  gayety,  impossible  to  us,  in  which 
they  had  celebrated  the  14th  of  July,  and  he  talked 
of  all  this  to  such  purpose  that  Toledo  became  the 
first  city  in  America  to  have  a  "sane"  Fourth  of 
July. 

Jones  and  Johnson,  because  they  had  vision,  were 
thinking  in  sequences  far  beyond  the  material  con- 
ceptions of  the  communities  about  them,  and  utterly 
impossible  to  skulking  city  politicians,  with  their 
miserable  little  treacheries  and  contemptible  and 
selfish  ambitions.  They  were  imagining  a  spirit 
which  might  and  perhaps  some  day  will  possess  a 
whole  people.  And  when  I  intimated  the  pity  it  was 
that  they  had  not  lived  to  see  that  silvery  Septem- 
ber day  when  the  people  of  Ohio  voted  for  munici- 
pal autonomy,  I  did  not  mean  in  the  least  to  aver 
that  their  dream  had  been  realized  for  us,  simply 
because  we  had  secured  an  amendment  to  our  funda- 
mental law.  Memoranda  to  this  effect  had  been 
noted  on  the  roll  of  the  constitution,  but  these  after 
all  were  but  the  cold,  formal  and  unlovely  terms  that 
expressed  concepts  which  had  been  evolving  slowly 
in  the  public  consciousness. 

They  realized,  what  all  intelligent  men  must  ere 
long  apprehend,  that  too  great  stress  has  been  laid 
on  mere  political  activity.  We  have  counted  it  as 
of  controlling  force  in  human  affairs,  the  energy  be- 
hind  human   activities,   the   cause,   instead    of   the 

369 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

effect,  the  motive,  instead  of  a  mere  expression  of 
our  complex  life.  They  saw  more  deeply  than  poli- 
tics, they  recognized  other  and  mightier  influences 
at  work,  affecting  the  interests  and  the  emotions  of 
men.  They  knew  that  there  is  after  all,  an  uncon- 
scious, subtle  wisdom  in  the  general  neglect  of 
politics  by  the  masses  of  citizens,  who  intuitively 
know  that  other  things  are  of  more  importance. 
They  were  but  seeking  to  clear  the  way  for  the 
more  fundamental  expressions  of  human  interest, 
human  emotions,  human  fervors,  human  liberties. 
For  of  course  it  is  not  the  city  that  makes  the 
people  free,  but  the  people  that  make  the  city  free; 
and  the  city  cannot  be  free  until  the  people  have 
been  freed  from  all  their  various  bondages,  free 
above  all  from  themselves,  from  their  own  igno- 
rances, littlenesses,  superstitions,  jealousies,  envies, 
suspicions  and  fears.  And  it  is  not  laws  that 
can  set  them  free,  nor  political  parties,  nor  or- 
ganizations, nor  commissions,  nor  any  sort  of  legal- 
istic machinery.  They  must  themselves  set  them- 
selves free,  and  themselves  indeed  find  out  the  way. 
Nor  is  that  freedom  to  be  defined;  its  chief  value 
lies,  as  does  that  of  any  concept  of  truth,  in  the  fact 
that  it  is  largely  impressionistic,  subject  to  the 
alterations  and  corrections  of  that  mysterious  sys- 
tem of  incessant  change  which  is  life  itself.  The 
value  and  even  the  permanence  of  many  ideals  and 
many  truths — for  truths  are  not  always  permanent, 
but  are  subject  to  the  flux  of  life — lie  in  the  fact 
that  they  are  impressionistic.  Reduced  to  formal 
lines   and  hardened  into   rigid  detail  they  become 

370 


FORTY   YEARS    OF    IT 

something  quite  otherwise  than  that  which  they  were 
at  first  or  were  intended  to  be. 

No,  neither  for  them,  nor  for  us,  had  the  dream 
come  true.  But  it  had  come  nearer.  It  had  become 
possible.  Many  obstacles  had  been  removed;  many 
purifications  had  been  wrought,  many  deliverances 
achieved.  To  Cleveland  and  to  Toledo,  those  two 
cities  by  the  lake,  the  years  had  brought  their 
changes.  Not  objectively,  perhaps;  outwardly  they 
were  much  the  same — without  form,  inharmonious, 
ugly,  with  the  awful  antitheses  of  our  economic 
system,  and  what  is  worse,  the  vast  welter  of 
mediocrity  and  banality  between.  But  there  had 
been  ameliorations.  In  each  of  them  there  were 
plans  traced  for  beautiful  civic  centers  with  groups 
of  buildings  and  other  public  amenities,  which,  when 
realized,  would  render  them  comparable  in  that  re- 
spect to  those  old  cities  of  Europe  where  the  benison 
of  art  has  descended  on  the  people  from  the  hands 
of  kings.  And  these  things  were  coming  up  out  of 
the  people,  despite  provincialism  and  philistinism 
and  politics ;  there  was  a  new  understanding  of  sov- 
ereignty, not  as  a  menace  descending  from  above, 
but  as  an  aspiration  coming  up  from  below.  And 
this  new  aspiration  in  the  people,  pressing  with  the 
irresistible  urge  of  moral  sentiment  against  old  in- 
stitutions will  renovate  the  cities  and  recreate  the 
lives  in  them. 

For  after  all  the  world  grows  better.  Not  as 
rapidly  as  we  should  like,  but  yet,  in  a  way,  better. 
The  immense  sophistication  of  the  modern  mood,  to 
be  sure,  is  apt  to   cast  contemporary  thought  in 

371 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

the  mould  of  multifold  negation;  and  sensibilities, 
long  distressed  by  the  contemplation  of  life  in 
aspects  it  would  not  wear  were  this  more  of  a  realm 
of  reason,  find  their  only  solace  in  that  pessimism 
which  makes  charming  so  much  of  modern  poetry. 
Doubtless  this  is  the  mood  most  congenial  to  the 
agnosticism  of  the  reflective,  contemplative  mind 
in  the  present  phase  of  its  philosophy.  It  has  its 
undoubted  fascinations,  its  uses,  and,  indeed,  its 
truth,  part  reaction  though  it  be  from  the  exces- 
sive strain  of  contemporary  life  in  cities,  and  the  dull 
orthodoxies  of  the  Victorian  age.  To  one,  indeed, 
who,  in  eight  years'  participation  in  municipal  poli- 
tics might  in  that  respect  have  been  compared  to 
that  character  in  one  of  Anatole  France's  novels 
who  never  opened  a  door  without  coming  upon  some 
hitherto  unsuspected  depth  of  infamy  in  mankind, 
it  was  difficult  to  avoid  that  strain.  And  yet,  bad 
as  municipal  government  has  been  in  this  land,  it  is 
everywhere  better  to-day.  The  level  of  moral  sen- 
timent, like  the  level  of  intelligence,  mounts  slowly, 
in  wide  spirals,  but  it  mounts  steadily  all  the  time. 
In  not  every  city  has  the  advance  been  so  marked, 
for  not  every  city  has  had  such  personalities  as 
Johnson  and  Jones,  and  without  personalities,  de- 
mocracies seem  unable  to  function.  The  old  corrup- 
tions, once  so  flagrant,  are  growing  less  and  less, 
and  there  is  left  only  the  residuum  of  meanness 
and  pettiness  and  spite,  the  crimes  that  require  no 
courage  and  entail  no  fear  of  the  law,  committed  by 
beings  who  never  could  attain  the  robust  stature  of 
the  old  and  brazen  and  robust  offenders.    The  strain 

372 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

is  running  out,  attenuating,  and  ere  long  will  be 
extinct. 

Those  gentle  pessimists  of  such  congenial  cul- 
ture may  indeed  point  to  other  ages  that  excel 
ours,  say  in  speculative  thought,  and  all  the  five 
arts,  but  I  think  it  is  demonstrable  that  upon  the 
whole,  and  employing  long  epochs  for  the  compari- 
son, things  are  growing  better.  Notwithstanding 
all  the  ignorance  and  all  the  woe  in  the  world  to- 
night, never  before  has  there  been  such  widespread 
opportunity  for  enlightenment,  never  such  wide- 
spread comfort,  never  so  much  kindness,  so  much 
pity  for  animals,  for  children,  and,  above  all,  never 
have  women  been  shown  such  consideration.  It  needs 
no  very  powerful  imagination,  peering  into  the  shad- 
owy background  of  human  history,  to  appreciate 
the  tremendous  implications  of  this  fact.  Indeed  the 
great  feminist  movement  of  our  time,  a  movement 
which  in  the  histories  of  mankind  centuries  hence 
will  be  given  the  sectional  mark  of  the  beginning 
of  a  new  age,  is  in  itself  the  proof  of  a  great  ad- 
vance, in  which  the  ballot  will  be  the  very  least 
important  of  all  the  liberties  to  be  won. 

With  all  the  complications  of  this  vast  and  con- 
fusing interplay  of  the  forces  of  this  age,  the  city 
is  inextricably  bound  by  its  awful  responsibility  for 
so  much  that  is  bad,  for  so  much  that  is  good,  in 
our  time.  And  in  the  cities,  now  as  always,  the 
struggle  for  liberty  will  go  on.  The  old  leaders 
will  pass,  and  the  new  will  pass,  and  pass  swiftly, 
for  they  are  quickly  consumed  in  the  stress  and  heat 
of  the  passionate  and  savage  struggle.     To  them 

373 


FORTY    YEARS    OF    IT 

must  ever  come  the  fatigue  of  long  drawn  opposi- 
tion, of  the  repeated  and  unavailing  assaults  on  the 
cold,  solid  and  impregnable  walls  of  institutions.  In 
this  fatigue  they  may  grow  conservative  after  a 
while,  and  they  should  pray  to  be  spared  the 
acquiescence  of  the  middle  years,  the  base  capitula- 
tion of  age. 

But  always  the  people  remain,  pressing  onward 
in  a  great  stream  up  the  slopes,  and  always  some- 
how toward  the  light.  For  the  great  dream  beckons, 
leads  them  on,  the  dream  of  social  harmony  always 
prefigured  in  human  thought  as  the  city.  This  ra- 
diant vision  of  the  city  is  the  oldest  dream  in  the 
world.  All  literature  is  saturated  with  it.  It  has 
been  the  ideal  of  human  achievement  since  the  day 
when  the  men  on  the  plains  of  Shinar  sought  to  build 
a  city  whose  towers  should  reach  unto  heaven.  It 
was  the  angelic  vision  of  the  mystic  on  Patmos,  the 
city  descending  out  of  heaven,  and  lying  foursquare, 
the  city  where  there  was  to  be  no  more  sorrow  nor 
crying.  It  has  been  the  goal  of  civilization  down 
to  this  hour  of  the  night,  when,  however  vaguely  and 
dimly,  the  ideal  stirs  the  thousands  in  this  feverish 
town  going  about  their  strange  and  various  busi- 
nesses, pleasures,  devotions,  sacrifices,  sins.  It  has 
been  the  everlasting  dream  of  humanity.  And  hu- 
manity will  continue  to  struggle  for  it,  to  struggle 
toward  it.  And  some  day,  somewhere,  to  the  sons  of 
men  the  dream  will  come  true. 

THE    END 


UC  SOUTHERN  REGIONAL  LIBRARY  FACILITY 


A     000  981  731     3 


